Lessons
by The Die Hard
Summary: Post Exodus. The folks from Special Operations (previously introduced in Interview) have a few things to teach Clark, er, Kal-El. FINISHED
1. Away

Lessons  
  
Set at the end of the second season. (Believe it or not, I didn't know that myself until I got to the end, and had to go back and revise the beginning. Feel free to pick nits on what I missed.) Same characters from "Interview," plus some of their friends. Rating: no sex, no drugs, no violence (unless you count the green rocks), no nudity (darn wimps), lots of emotional abuse.  
  
Disclaimer: for entertainment purposes only. Smallville and all associated characters belong to somebody else. The Special Operations folks are my own creations, and though you wouldn't want to meet any of them in a dark alley -- or bright daylight, either, for that matter, if one of them were on your bad side -- they're just around for the fun of it. And no, this is NOT any darn AU X-Men. I haven't picked up an X-Men (also copyright somebody else) since 1982, or seen the stupid movies either. Xavier doesn't read Lovecraft or Koontz. I do.  
  
Lesson: don't try to put one over on people who have been there and done that. _ _ _ _ _  
  
The wind whipped by him, far slower than he could run. The engine growled beneath him, a toy he could have picked up and crushed between finger and thumb. The countryside gave way to houses, to countryside again, to cities. He didn't see them. They were all the same to him. Unimportant. Ephemeral. Meaningless.  
  
Not his. Not his home. Not his life. Not his world.  
  
The redness burned in his veins. It hurt, some, like a high fever or the edge of an overdose of alcohol. It was, after all, more or less the same stuff as the green rocks, the only thing that could kill him, just aimed at his mind instead of his body. Poisonous, he knew. But it kept the other hurt, the worse hurt, the loss and grief and abandonment, subdued.  
  
Nothing else on this planet -- not that the rocks were of this planet -- could so much as scratch his skin. Not bullets, not lasers, not even a nuclear bomb, probably. In the haze of redness, he was half tempted to go find out. Maybe they were testing a nuke somewhere.  
  
Maybe he'd go set one off himself. So what? He'd already renounced or destroyed everything he cared about, everyone and everything that meant anything to him.  
  
His parents were long dead. Hells, his whole species was long dead. His whole world was long dead. And his last and only link to that world, his only way of ever maybe finding out who and what he and his own people were, was dead now, too. At his own hands.  
  
The people who had raised him hated him, and with good reason. His friends all knew him for a liar and a falsehood. They probably thought he was an alien invader too.  
  
If they thought of him at all, any more.  
  
("Have a nice life, Clark." And she'd stomped away. She was gone from his life.)  
  
He hadn't been able to explain to her. He hadn't had time. The voice screaming in his head had made it impossible to hear his friend. Alien hell had been engulfing him, consuming him, threatening all that he held dear and all that he believed he was. And he'd had to destroy it all to be free of the terror of hurting those he most wanted to keep close.  
  
His betrayal of all he'd loved and cared about stabbed him, hurt worse even than holding that terrible pure green octagon in his bare fingers had. Nearly dying had not felt as bad as the decision he'd finally made. To shut them all out, not even try to be part of their lives any more. Not to have friends. Never again.  
  
Only the red burning held it at bay. For now.  
  
Not his world. Not his world.  
  
The engine began to sputter. Clark -- Kal-El, he reminded himself automatically, there was no Clark any more -- glanced at the gages. Out of gas. His lips curled in a sneer. Wouldn't you know it. Machines ran out of gas. He never did. Never could.  
  
Rule them with strength, echoed in his mind. Shut up, he snarled. I can't even convince them to build a decent power source on this filthy reckless unthinking planet.  
  
He abandoned the bike and went on walking. Why run? There was no place to run to. No place he wanted to go. Except away.  
  
The countryside gave way to a town again. He didn't care. He ignored the people, their glances, friendly or suspicious. Not his. Not his town. Not his home. Not his world.  
  
He may as well not even have been there. He wasn't part of this world. They could do nothing to him. He could do nothing but hurt them, or save them from something temporarily, and what difference did it make? They meant nothing to him. Never would. Never could. They were just ... animals. Nobodies. Nothing. He didn't care. Couldn't care.  
  
To care, you had to belong. He didn't belong here. Never had. Never would. He was only walking because there was nothing else to do. Nothing mattered. Nobody cared if he lived or died. Would probably prefer that he died. So what. Made no difference to him.  
  
So the sudden hard grip on his wrist from behind took him by complete surprise, and he reacted too slowly to resist the powerful fingers that ripped the ring from him. Literally, tore the metal, not wasting the time to try to slip it off. He spun just in time to see a big dark woman pop the whole thing in her mouth and swallow. "Bleagh!" she said, massaging her throat. "That stings almost as bad as the green stuff. And Wynter's gonna be truly ticked at me for destroying his sample. What in all the nine billion names of god has gotten into you, kid? You look one sandwich short of catatonic."  
  
Clark (Kal-El, Kal-El, echoed in his mind) stared at the woman he knew, remembered, to be an artificial creature, as strong as he was and even more invulnerable, though not as fast or with a lot of his other so-called gifts. Someone who had offered him friendship, and a sense of belonging. Once upon a time.  
  
Reflex closed out any thought of belonging or connection. Not his world. Not his world. No one like him. No one who could understand.  
  
She had been made in a laboratory, he (Clark?) remembered. Not her world either, really. Maybe she could understand. Maybe....  
  
The thread of even a possibility of acceptance again hurt even worse.   
  
The dulling red haze faded. Her "stomach" was a nuclear furnace. There wouldn't be anything more than atoms of the ring left by now. The real pain, the pain that lived too deep inside him to ever exorcise, came roaring back over him. "Nicole," he said weakly. "Don't."  
  
He fainted.  
  
When the world came slowly back, he was lying on something comfortable, a cool wet cloth over his eyes, moving -- according to his gravitational senses -- faster than anything even Lex drove, and considerably farther away from the ground. A plane. His ears identified the steady subsonic droning. Okay, a jet. A jet with a couch? He sat up.  
  
"Gotta go, Jack. The kid's awake, and there will be hell to pay if he puts us into the ground." Nicole flipped some switches, and left her cockpit seat to stand in front of Clark, arms folded. "Care to tell me what that was all about?"  
  
Clark (Kal-El, get used to it) very nearly did. Then he averted his eyes. "No."  
  
"Hm. We know about the explosion at your place. We have a crew of builders led by an ex-construction battalion looey, a Seabee, on their way right now, and they know what to look for. They think it's a treat, they don't get fresh corn off the stalk very often. We know about Lex's wedding to that arrogant fool pawn of Lionel's, of course. A couple of our people have joined his cleaning staff, and his collections and records are about to undergo some interesting alterations. We know your mom had a miscarriage, but at her age, and after all the toxins she and Jonathan have been exposed to -- and I'm talking DDT here, not meteorites -- she was pushing the odds anyway. Any of that sound familiar?"  
  
Clark slumped. He didn't want to think about any of it, but reflex made him defend the people who had raised him. "My parents -- " Kal-El, Kal-El, not Clark, not Kent -- "The Kents use organic farming."  
  
"Not twenty years ago, they didn't. Why do you think they were both sterile in the first place? Why do you think half the town was so susceptible to kryptonite mutation? There'll be pesticide teratogens in the soil there for another hundred years."  
  
Kal-El gritted his teeth. Very unKryptonian. "I don't. Want. To talk about it."  
  
"Suit yourself, kid." Nicole went back to the pilot's seat.  
  
"Where are you taking me?" Not that it mattered. Not any more. Not his world.  
  
Nicole tilted her head sideways in consideration. "To a top secret installation hidden in plain sight. A castle with an electronic and industrial moat. The center of civilization out in the middle of nowhere. To see John."  
  
John, the Baron, the mysterious head of Special Operations, for whom both the dangerously powerful Nicole and her even more frightening partner, head field agent Lake Anderson, worked. Clark would have been thrilled, and more than a little scared. Kal-El didn't care one way or the other. Yeah, he could wreck the plane, but both he and Nicole would survive it, and what would be the point? What was the point of anything?  
  
"Fine." He laid back down, and lulled by the engine drone, drifted off to sleep. 


	2. Welcome to the Monkey House

Welcome to the Monkey House  
  
Touchdown woke him, with a moment of panic before he remembered where he was. "Easy," came Nicole's voice. "Just another few minutes."  
  
Clark (Kal-El, Kal-El, repeated the mantra in his mind) sighed and sat up, slumping. Who cared? What difference did it make? "Where's Lake?" he thought to ask, after a minute.  
  
Nicole spared time from her instruments to give him a look he could not read. "On assignment," she said neutrally. "Nothing you need to be concerned about."  
  
Clark felt a small and painful thrill of aliveness again. For it to be something they were keeping from HIM, it must have been nasty indeed. Then the feeling drained away. So what? Not his concern. Not his world. "I thought you two did everything together."  
  
"Actually, only when the assignment calls for a team. We work solo as often as not. I'm just the only one who can stand her, and vice versa."  
  
The only ones who could survive each other, Clark thought. Like being around me. He scrubbed his face in his hands. Maybe this was where he belonged. If they could survive people like Nicole and Lake, maybe they wouldn't be in too much danger from Kal-El.  
  
Yeah, right. Kal-El belonged on another planet. A planet that was no longer there.  
  
The plane stopped and shut down, taken over by mutterings on the radio. Nicole approached him with a grin. "Okay, now we have to blindfold you."  
  
"What for?" Kal-El said tiredly, almost in self-loathing of his gifts. "It's not as if I can't see through it. Or set it on fire. Or rip it with my eyelids, if you tie it tight enough."  
  
"It's a tradition," Nicole said, mock sternly. "Like crossing the equator. You don't think half the people who come through here couldn't get out of it? We have a pretty fair share of escape artists. No cheating, or it doesn't count."  
  
"Oh, well then. In that case." Clark (Kal-El, his mind insisted, but with a little less conviction) closed his eyes, and wondered at the feel of spider-silk brushing gossamer across his face. This really was a game, he realized, in dawning wonder. Nicole, whose partner and friend was probably off doing something incredibly dangerous and maybe risking death (Lake? hah!) right now, had taken the time out to play a game. With him. For him.  
  
The small tingle of aliveness came back, and this time, though still painful, it stayed.  
  
He submitted himself to the blindfold's symbology of helplessness. For awhile, at least, he would abandon the hell that his life had become into someone else's hands.  
  
The entry foyer, once Nicole ripped away the spidery silk, looked like any office building's, cool and tastefully appointed and completely, boringly impersonal. Nicole waved at the three receptionists, all of whom were multitasking with computers and telephones and headgear, and one took time out to call towards them in return, "Hey, Nikki! Hey, Clark! Welcome to the monkey house!" before she turned back to snarl something into her headpiece. Clark shook his head in surrender.  
  
Around the corner, two elevators and a stairwell door. Clark (Kal-El?) blinked. From the air, the industrial-looking campus had all appeared to be only one or two stories. What would they need an elevator for? Nicole waved her hand over what looked like a plain ordinary beam sensor, which Clark was pretty sure it wasn't, and the doors opened.  
  
There were only two buttons, one lit. But there were eight depressions below that, and Nicole stuck her finger in one on the second row. "It's keyed to you, too," Nicole said casually, "but even with x-ray vision, you'd get lost without a map down here."  
  
The doors slid open to reveal a wall covered by the aforementioned map, ten rough circles laid out in order, left-to-right representing top to bottom. Clark studied it with more-or-less interest. In the underground levels, the separate buildings were all connected by tunnels -- safety precaution as well as convenience, Clark thought detachedly. Aboveground was all office buildings, though no doubt some were more limited-access than others. Below were more administrative areas, labs, dorms, food sections, large sectors marked simply "observation" or "training," a whole damn power plant. "You might want to wander around the grounds on the surface until you get a feel for the layout," Nicole said offhand. "Just ask anyone if you want an escort. Come on, let's get you settled in and take the dime tour."  
  
An escort? Clark frowned at her. A bodyguard? For HIM? Or a spy?  
  
Nicole met his look and shook her head, a carefully learned gesture. "We gotta do something about that suspicious nature of yours, kid. You're among friends here. Anything you want to know, just ask. I might have to clock you a good one every once in awhile if you get too uppity, but nobody is going to treat you like a dork or lie to you."  
  
Clark managed a small smile, finally, at the threat of being punched out. "Am I that easy to read?"  
  
"Like a cheap comic book. What the HELL...!"  
  
Clark would have asked the same thing, but he settled for going into overdrive and shoving Nicole out of the way of the lightning bolt that split the air between them. It probably wouldn't have hurt her any more than it did him, but instinct and old reflexes die hard, and protecting others still came as first nature to him. He took a few hundred thousand volts across the shoulder and bounced off the wall, landing on top of Nicole in a tangle. "Ow."  
  
Nicole shot to her feet and dragged him up with her, expression murderous. "DYLANA! KNOCK IT OFF BEFORE JOHN HAS YOU PUT IN A CAGE !"  
  
A woman appeared at the doorway down the hall from the corner they had just turned, leaning casually against it. "Sorry. I was just giving Little Sky some pointers in lightning control. Didn't realize anyone was out here. Good thing it was just you two."  
  
"You call THAT a lesson in CONTROL? And don't even TRY to tell me that you didn't know exactly who was out here and exactly where we were. The room's not THAT well shielded." Nicole was seething. Clark watched her open fury with undisguised interest. Artificial nuclear construct she may be, no such thing as adrenal glands, but she was capable of outright rage. Maybe he was, too? He'd never allowed himself the luxury. "One of these days, you'll pull one of your grandstanding stunts in front of Lake, and that will be the end of your welcome here, if you're very lucky."  
  
Dylana raised her eyebrows. "I'll keep that in mind." She went back into the room.  
  
"She does that condescension thing on purpose too, you know," Nicole growled. "May as well introduce you properly, so you know to ignore her from now on. At least Little Sky isn't such a starts-with-a-capital-b." Bemused, Clark followed her into the room.  
  
The other woman in the room turned as they came in, and Clark's breath caught. From the name "Little Sky," he'd been expecting a Native American, but the small, slender woman not much older than he was had the exotic beauty of a pan-Asian / Polynesian mix. Her eyes held mysteries, depths, promises. Her delicate yet self-assured smile was a siren song. Clark realized his mouth was hanging open when he gulped and found it dry.  
  
She came over to them, hips swaying just suggestively enough, as if she were slow-dancing rather than walking. She held out a hand in languid invitation, more as if to stroke a pet than shake hands. "Pleased to finally meet you, Kal-El."  
  
The slight accent made his alien name sing. Clark felt dizzy. "Um. You too." He took her hand as if it were a flower, feeling her fingertips brush across the inside of his wrist, his palm, tracing nerves that lit up at her touch. Clark fought very hard not to drool. Or faint.  
  
"Now who's grandstanding?" came Dylana's bored voice, from very far away.  
  
Nicole frowned. "Skylark, behave yourself. He's under a lot of stress right now, and he doesn't need you adding to it."  
  
Little Sky gave him another secretive smile, and released him from her touch. Clark wondered if there were some new kind of kryptonite in the room, because he was definitely weak in the knees. "I could tell. I thought I might be able to help," she said softly.  
  
"Yeah, right. Try that on John and see how far it gets you." Nicole was still mad, Clark realized, and still looking for someone to take it out on. "And Dylana, absolutely no playing with high frequencies while the kid is here. And cool it on the lightning."  
  
Dylana's face swung towards Clark, and gave him a once-over, and it struck Clark suddenly that she was, at least in the eyes, blind. There was no focus at all in the light hazel-brown, and one pupil was noticeably larger than the other. But her attention on Clark was direct and unerring. She nodded. "I can tell which ones to stay away from."  
  
"Yeah, and your control is so good that you fried every microwave transmitter for ten klicks around and blew two full-scale shielded UPSs trying to cook popcorn. I said no playing with frequencies at all, Dill-pickle, and I mean it. Or every single agent and operator will be instructed to call you dill-pickle in public for the rest of your life."  
  
Dylana held up her hands in surrender. "Cheeze, just tell Lake, why don't you? I'm not going to hurt him, okay? But what's the point in being here if I can't experiment? It's not like I can do much in the way of lab work any more."  
  
"Maybe you should take a vacation," Nicole said bluntly. "Get out of here for awhile." It was, Clark thought, about as rude an invitation to go away that he's ever heard.  
  
Dylana's unseeing eyes narrowed. "Maybe I should," she returned in the same voice. "Come on, Skylark. We still have to work on your recognition of cloud-to-cloud potential paths, and for that we need to be outside." Over her shoulder, "If you will excuse us."  
  
Nicole glared at her, then tightened her lips and motioned for Clark to head out too. Clark looked back, troubled. "That -- what was that all about?"  
  
Nicole looked unhappy, almost defeated. "It's a running battle with Dylana. Doctor Dylana Cartak is not exactly a Special, but she is one of the most brilliant physicists in the history of technology. Also, dammit, one of the most careless. Thank the spirits of the Manhattan Project that she was working on remote diagnostic equipment when she screwed up, and not weapons. She could be channeling atomic explosions instead of just lightning."  
  
Clark looked at her. "Huh?" Oh, wow, Clark thought, now that was really cool and composed for a Kryptonian who was supposed to rule the world.  
  
Nicole hesitated, considering, not how much to tell him, but how. John's strict order were that no secrets be kept from the alien kid, because they could not afford to alienate him any further. They had already almost lost him. It would be walking on eggs to reconstruct his shattered teenage psyche, but nothing had ever been more worth the effort.  
  
Carefully: "Dylana shorted an experimental instrument across her own body, working at unauthorized power levels and more than a little drunk. It didn't kill her -- it should have, but apparently she's got a trace of meta-genetics, that's the ability to mutate under stress, that kicked in for a last-ditch emergency survival. But it did blind her and fry half her nervous system. Now she 'sees' by electrical and magnetic fields, and she can access, and to a certain extent control, the entire electromagnetic spectrum. Unfortunately, being able to track radiation directly doesn't allow her to read books or computer screens, or to do much else of her former life's work any more. She's bored. Her control is slipping. And she just doesn't seem to give much of a damn about anything these days."  
  
"So why did you tell her she couldn't do even that while -- " it sank in at that point, but he finished the sentence anyway. "While I was here?"  
  
Nicole glanced at him sidewise, as if to say, I know you're not THAT stupid. "You heard what I said about her frying everything microwave-based for ten klicks around while making popcorn. Imagine if she went high-order out of control like that on oh, say, certain of the gamma frequencies."  
  
The radiation equivalent, although without the attendant chemical poisoning, of kryptonite. At a power level that, as she put it, had fried a shielded UPS. Clark shuddered. He had figured as much, but it wasn't much reassuring to have it confirmed. "It's still not fair to her to -- what you said -- put her in a cage, just because I'm here."  
  
Nicole made a chuckle. "A Faraday cage, Smallville. Look it up. And I have an ulterior motive. Call it fair turnabout. She did the high-frequency thing to me deliberately a few times." Catching the sudden loss of blood from his face, she added hastily, "With my permission, of course. Purely for scientific purposes, though I'm pretty sure she enjoyed it. I didn't, but it can't kill me, and Wynter's biophysics team had a high old time with the readouts from the few thousand machines they'd wired me to. All of which Dylana ended up frying, naturally. But we are flat out not going to risk that happening to you, even by accident."  
  
"Maybe I should be the one to leave," Clark mumbled.  
  
Nicole stopped him with a hand on his arm. "Clark. Kal-El. Did it ever occur to you that other people ought to take the blame for their own actions once in awhile? Dylana did something really, really stupid to get where she is now, powers and not. She's lucky she's not dead already. It's not YOUR fault, and don't you dare go trying to claim it. A fifty-year-old Nobel Laureate with three doctorates might be a little insulted by your, hm, presumption."  
  
Well, put that way, he supposed that being Kryptonian might not be something to be so arrogant about. Clark stopped himself. Arrogant? Was that what Kal-El was? He hadn't thought so, but the pieces did seem to begin to fall into place. A society that thought itself superior. The tendency to believe that he not only COULD do anything, but had failed if he didn't do EVERYthing. He, Clark, remembered a terse lecture from the first time he had met Lake and Nicole. "We are not gods, and we must not ever try to play god." If anyone could play god, it was Special Operations, and they were adamant about refusing to do so.  
  
Still. "I just hate her having to give up something, just because I'm here." Or to be the cause of such animosity as he had seen between Nicole and Dylana, though that, at least, probably wasn't ALL his fault. "Maybe we could just, you know, work out a schedule...."  
  
Nicole heaved a huge, fake sigh. She looked around -- at x-ray, Clark realized, catching the slightly-distant focus that meant she was looking beyond the walls. He followed suit. No one within a hundred meters of them, and unless their Specials included people with better hearing than his, no one who could hear them.  
  
"Actually, kid," she said in a low voice, starting down the hallway again, "you're an excuse, and one we welcome. You're not the cause of the limits we keep trying to put on her. We've been trying to get her to limit herself.  
  
"In the first place, Dylana doesn't generate lighting out of atmospheric potential, the way our pretty little friend who was just uncouth enough to use her power of mother nature's temptations on you does. Doc Cartak steals it from whatever source is closest and most concentrated, which is why it's so much easier for her than for Skylark to make a lightning bolt. Our electric bill practically doubles whenever Dylana gets in a bad mood.  
  
"In the second, for all her genius, she isn't actually very good at the extra-normal stuff. She wasn't born with it, and she wasn't physically meant to be able to do it. Mostly what she does -- when she's not blowing up our own equipment -- is piss off the National Weather Service and whatever power company has to be sent out to do repairs.  
  
"And in the third place," Nicole glanced at him, gaging his reaction, "it's killing her."  
  
Clark froze between steps. "...What?"  
  
"I told you. The short-circuit activated some mutant gene, but it wasn't very much in the way of a mutation. Dylana has three kids by three different fathers, all of whom are brilliant in their own right -- and all of whom think she's a nut, with those white plastic and rubber sixties boots at her age -- so she had to have been pretty close to human normal.   
  
"She's not bad at control because she doesn't know what she's doing, or just getting old. She's losing the ability to feel and control what she's doing because she's dying."  
  
Clark closed his eyes, and fought the faintness again. So this was what it was like to feel really helpless. It wasn't enough to hurt the ones you cared for. You had to watch your friends hurting themselves, at their own will, and not be able to do a thing about it. Even he hadn't had much experience at that. (Though he probably would, his heritage taunted him.)  
  
Was that the real source of the surface animosity between the invulnerable Nicole and the too-human, too-vulnerable doctor who played with lightning? That they were in fact friends, and one was watching the other destroy herself and couldn't do anything about it?  
  
Nicole had found him practically in the middle of nowhere. So they had been watching him. They had known what he had done. Could they understand what it had cost him? Maybe.... He knew at least one of the Specials was an empath. And so Nicole had basically kidnapped him. What did they think they could do about the voice in his mind? Had they brought him here to try to protect him, or protect the rest of the world from him?  
  
Dammit. He couldn't breathe. He suddenly sympathized all too much with Dylana. He couldn't just let himself be put completely in someone else's hands. But he didn't want to just push people away and be alone anymore. He couldn't take responsibility for everything and everyone, even if he wanted to. But he wasn't helpless. He wasn't dying. Dammit.  
  
Doctor Dylana Cartak would probably say the same thing.  
  
"Is there anything..." he managed.  
  
"You can do? Yeah. Stay out of her way. Take care of yourself for a change. Get some rest. Talk to people. Wander around and think. Go work out on my weight machines. Read some books. Try to figure out where your head is at. Quit worrying about everybody and everything else. And remember that you're still a teenager, for pity's sake. All teenagers go through this crap, if they have half a brain. Except maybe Lake, and she's as crazy as they come. At least she admits it. Now come on. You haven't had anything to eat that even I would call food for three days, or any sleep for a week until you passed out on me, and even you aren't THAT indestructible."  
  
Clark felt a small but real smile come tremblingly back. "Says who?"  
  
"Sez me, and a few dozen others who have ways of knowing. Food first, or sleep? The spaghetti in the commons tonight has enough garlic that I can actually taste it."  
  
Clark took a deep breath, and then realized that that had been a mistake. All of a sudden, he wanted nothing more to do than crash. "I'm -- a little tired."  
  
Nicole looked at him with as much sympathy as her artificial skin could manage. She wasn't capable of getting tired herself, though she did use self-hypnosis for mental breaks, but the jury was still out on whether she was, in fact, a living being or not. Clark, extra-terrestrial though he was, was also most definitely still a teenage boy. "Yeah, I can just imagine."  
  
The dorm room, four hallways and two levels down, was not, quite, sterile. The bathroom looked like a standard motel's, towels and such. The kitchenette had the bare minimum of utensils (all steel, no accidentally-meltable plastic). The dresser held t-shirts, jeans, workout shorts. Clark examined it by x-ray, bemused. "Somebody stocked up?"  
  
Nicole shrugged dramatically. "Would you believe a precognetic with fashion sense?"  
  
Clark managed a short laugh. "No. I believe spies, of course."  
  
"Hmph. Actually, Markov is a precog -- we have to put him to serious work to keep him from playing with the lottery every three days -- but he has no better fashion sense than you do. Everything in there is in your usual primary colors. If you want anything else, you'll have to ask the supply people. But don't try telling them you need a leather jacket. There aren't three people here who don't know your temperature tolerances, and the few who aren't vegans are that way because they have to eat animal flesh for metabolic purposes."  
  
Crap. They weren't going to be real sympathetic with a farm boy, even if he was from another planet. Clark suddenly felt Kal-El's disgust at the thought of eating animals, too. Not because they were living beings with nervous systems and the ability to suffer, but because they were dirty, part of unsterilized, offensive, lower-level life-form environment.   
  
Clark, who had grown up mucking out stalls, was suddenly angry at the nose-in-the-air attitude of himself (his other self?), and queasy over both the anger and the eating thing, and disoriented, all at once. Okay, so it hadn't entirely been the explosion, or the red ring. He really was seriously disconnected in his head over his dual heritage. Trying to be both at the same time, he had become neither one nor the other.  
  
Clark sat down heavily, one hand going involuntarily to his head and the other across his stomach. "I think I just need a nap," he muttered.  
  
It was a good thing, Nicole thought, that she had such a natural poker face. What she really wanted to do was shake Clark until his teeth rattled and yell at him for being too dumb to ask for help right up front. It was going to be a mess getting him to come to terms with himself over the mistakes he'd made trying to go it alone.  
  
But the usual brutal frankness that most of the Specials were perfectly accustomed to wouldn't work here. Clark was not only in bad shape, but he still was, after all, only a child, as those who had been through what she and Lake had been reckoned things.  
  
"Sure, kid," she said softly, sympathetically. "It's been a long day for you. And the red rock does take it out of you -- it causes damage, I know, even if the effects are different. Kick back and nap a little. I'll be back with some peanut butter sandwiches for a late lunch."  
  
Clark all but fell back on the thick pillow. "Peanut butter sandwiches...?"  
  
"Last I looked, growing boys needed protein." Nicole ruffled his hair, and let her hand (artificial, artificial) rest on his forehead. Protectively. "Clark...?"  
  
"Kal-El," he corrected, sleepily, automatically, not really caring.  
  
"Whatever. I just want to make sure you know -- we're here for you. I mean, I have an assignment, I have to leave here pretty soon. I HAVE to. It's what I do, kid, what I am, what I have to be if I can ever justify my own existence and earn my friends. But I'm not abandoning you. Please, Kal, believe that, no matter what. We will never abandon you."  
  
Clark, Kal-El, looked up at her from his prone position, and the two people within him fought a violent but brief battle. His birth parents had sent him away. His adoptive parents had sent him away. The only ones willing to take him in were freaks themselves.  
  
And they had other things to do. His breath let out on a tired sigh. "I believe you."  
  
Nicole also let out a breath, one that she did not need to take except to talk with. Thank all the gods, was the thought she kept hidden behind the fake face. She stroked the inhumanly powerful child's forehead with a carefully gentle thumb. "Deep breaths. Doze off. I'll be back as soon as I can beat the chef into making peanut butter sandwiches without him demanding to put garlic and cloves and parsley and Emeril knows what else on it."  
  
Clark's eyes closed, his breathing coming in almost a snore already. "Don', mm, beat up the, mm, chef...."  
  
"Don't worry. He's a Special. He'd turn my bunk into a science project of slimy green growing things if I so much as interrupted his creation of a salad."  
  
Clark sighed. She was right, the red rock had been slow poison. He felt sick, and exhausted, as the reaction caught up with him. "Can't stay," he murmured. "Dangerous...."  
  
"No, it isn't. Anything that can get past John's security isn't worth worrying about. The whole planet will be destroyed first." Oh, dammit -- that was a very wrong thing to say. Clark probably believed he should be first in line against planet-destroying threats. Teaching the brat to play teamwork and quit taking point alone was going to take Wynter's entire psych team, and John's Martian counterpart's high-powered telepathy to boot.  
  
"Dangerous to *you,*" Clark murmured. "To everyone I care about."  
  
In her mind, Nicole said every obscenity that she'd ever heard from their retired SEAL team members. "I am not going to sing you a lullaby," Nicole said, voice breaking as her control over her purely voluntary air intake faltered. "But I'll be around. While I can."  
  
"I know." Clark's voice was a whisper, but still all too much achingly aware.  
  
Nicole placed her hands on either side of his head. She would never have dared do that with anyone else, unless she was trying to kill them slowly; her internal radiation levels would fry a geiger counter on contact. Clark just made a small sound, half acceptance, half withdrawal, all pain. Emotional overload. "It's okay, kid," she whispered, knowing that now she was lying, that for him, there never would be such thing as "okay" -- or "kid" -- again.  
  
"If you say so." Clark's weary voice was all but gone. Nicole did not have hearing capabilities more than a normal perfect human's -- she couldn't be damaged, but she couldn't be improved upon. She moved a hand down to his, and gripped it, like small child's.  
  
A small child who could shatter construction steel in his fingers, throw buildings over the horizon if the building would have the courtesy to stay in one piece. Nicole bowed her head over their paired folded hands. His sudden spastic insecure clutching in return would have crushed anyone else to bloody jelly. His stifled sobs were beyond even her ability to do anything about. She herself was incapable of tears, or any other emotions except the ones she'd been taught by having them shoved in her face during long patient practice.   
  
Even Lake hadn't frightened her, at first. Even Kal-El hadn't impressed her, at first.  
  
Now she knew that she might have to kill Lake someday, and that she might even manage it if she moved fast enough. And that she would oppose even John before she would hurt Clark, whatever it took. She would never be one of them, but she belonged to all of them, so alike in their difference, and so completely, irrevocably different from each other.  
  
"I'll be back in a little while," she whispered. "Chunky or smooth?"  
  
Clark did not answer. 


	3. Spending My Summer Vacation at School

Spending My Summer Vacation at School  
  
He woke slowly, which was unusual for him, and spent long minutes contemplating the ceiling. His hand rubbed absently at the scar tissue on his chest, already fading. Whatever programming had been left in the ship wasn't going to control him that way any longer, at least. But did the lack of coercion change anything? He could still hear the echoes of the alien (father's) voice in his mind. He was still Kal-El, with the weight of that command that possibly had been built into his genes. Could he be Kal-El, and still be Clark too?  
  
He didn't know. He was still scared. Of himself, of the ship, of destiny. Everything.  
  
He sighed and rolled over. He knew one thing, he wasn't scared of the stack of peanut butter sandwiches he could smell, or the bottles of juice and soy milk (SOY MILK! -- he could just hear Jonathan Kent's outraged voice holler) he found in the refrigerator. He grinned through the peanut butter stuck to his lips. It didn't taste like milk, but it was pretty good, and there was no one here to lecture him about drinking straight from the bottle.  
  
His smile faded at the short note beside the plate of sandwiches. Yes, Nicole had cautioned him that she had to leave. Yes, she promised to be back when she could. Yes, he had promised to believe that he wasn't being abandoned.   
  
But her absence still hurt. There was no one else who knew what it was like, to have to be so careful of the so-easily-breakable people around him all the time.  
  
The doubt and guilt and hurt settled in its accustomed place behind his eyes. He sighed and took a shower and picked a t-shirt at random and went exploring on his own.  
  
He went straight to Level 3 (there is no level three, snickered an old memory) just to prove he could, and was promptly terrified by a shout behind him. "Clark! Kal-El!" Clark turned just as an undersized teenager hurtled into him, practically jumping up and grabbing him and spinning around and dancing with him at the same time. "You came! You came! Oh, boy! Have you gotten settled in yet? Met everybody? Ready to get started on the tests? C'mon, I'll show you what you'll need to set up...."  
  
Clark's bemusement at the younger boy's hyperactivity slid suddenly to an all too familiar cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. He had recognized the kid immediately, just from Lake's and Nicole's off-hand references: Wynter did indeed look like a mutant, his slightly bulging head accentuated by unkempt hair that would have been in hopeless knots if it weren't as fine and straight as a cat's; sock-footed (two different colors, both with holes), his shirt in a condition that Jonathan Kent wouldn't have used for a tool rag. The super-brained boy had pronounced "Kal-El" with a Kryptonian accent so unnervingly perfect that it echoed in Clark's mind -- Wynter probably spoke Clark's native tongue (Kal-El, Kal-El) better than Clark did himself. His eyes glittered with enthusiasm and terrifying intelligence.  
  
Clark met those eyes, and all his life-long reflexive paranoia came back. "Tests...?"  
  
"Math and physics through five dimensions at least, biology and chemistry with interrelated applications, history and philosophy from both Asian and European viewpoints, communications and game theory, languages.... We need to know your true comprehension levels, so we can design you a program for your self-study that doesn't either leave out something unexpectedly crucial or bore you to tears. How you managed to keep from going insane from ennui in regular school, I'll never know. You must have self-control to rival John's." Wynter gave him an odd look. "You don't look happy about it. Am I moving too fast? Sorry, sometimes I forget that other people need a break from school."  
  
Now Clark was embarrassed. "No, that's not it. I'm really looking forward to seeing how far I can go. I just .. I mean, my parents -- the Kents -- were always warning me...."  
  
Wynter managed to look sympathetic and disgusted at the same time. "You've been watching too much bad sci-fi, and I do mean sci fi, as opposed to science fiction. We'll start by putting Asimov on your evening reading list; I want you through the first hundred of his books by the end of the week. Let the librarians know what your preference for order is, fiction or non or mixed, and they'll have them sorted."  
  
Clark blinked. "The first HUNDRED? Wynter, even I'm not that fast."  
  
"You will be. The analysis team can teach you speed reading and mnemonics, which you're going to need anyway. We have a lot to get through just to get you on course and up to where you ought to be, and not much time to do it in, no matter what decision you make about the rest of your life. Damn John's midwest team for not following through on that meteor fall, anyway. They should have found you and started you on special training a decade ago. Though to be fair, it wasn't their fault they were killed in that militia disaster."  
  
The cold feeling was back. "You mean, made a project of me."  
  
"Well, of course created a project for you! Stars and planets, John creates projects and special training for kids if they so much as survive a flood or win a science fair, though most of them don't pan out and never know they've been watched and gotten a boost. We -- John, that is -- found almost all the Specials that way, and about half the rest of the team. The other kids at least got some decent schooling out of it. The usual training and education available to the public these days is so bad that it's a wonder the whole damn technological infrastructure hasn't collapsed, much less that we're still managing anything in terms of research and development into anything new."  
  
"...Oh." Clark reigned in his thoughts and firmly forced them on a different path from the one they usually automatically followed. "I'm sorry. I guess I misunderstood. I'm just use to thinking that, that I'm," he caught himself one second before using the word "freak," which would have been gauche, considering the company, and stumbled to, "that people would want to, like, exploit people who are, you know, different."  
  
Wynter sighed and took out his pocket communicator. "Note to Kate: put all the books dealing with experimenting on aliens into the controlled-access section, and put a big sign on the door: Off Limits To Clark Kent And / Or Kal-El Until We Beat Some Sense Into Him And Some Of His Paranoia Out Of Him." He clicked the Star-Trek model phone shut. "Seriously, Clark, you can read that crap if you want to, but there's a few million other better things for you to read while you're here, so don't waste your time."  
  
"And actually, the only place in the complex that is absolutely off-limits to you, under any and all circumstances, I don't care if there's a nuclear bomb going off, is Lab 8. The kryptonite room is under triple personnel-recognition lock while you're here, and the vaults are three centimeters of lead with steel casing, but there's always the chance of atomic particulate contamination. In fact, you're not even supposed to be in the Lab 6 through 10 wing at all without both a science partner and a guard escort strong and fast enough to get you out immediately if something goes wonky. Eight has its own sealed air supply, and our HVAC crew is very good, but there are such things as microcracks and Murphy's Laws. We would strongly prefer that you not go into the 6-through-10 wing at all if any Lab 8 experiments are underway. Not that we have any scheduled while you're here, but all the contingencies any of us could come up with in our worst nightmares have been planned for."  
  
"As for exploiting?" Wynter grinned suddenly. "Is it 'exploiting' to want to help someone use all their talents, be the very best they can be? I'll grant you that some sports coaches and music masters push a little hard, but everyone needs a good kick in the pants to motivate themselves every now and then." He mimed kicking at Clark's rear end, and Clark dodged, laughing with the giddiness of sudden relief.  
  
"Don't! You'll break your foot."  
  
"Oh, well. Maybe just meeting John will serve the same purpose." Wynter seized his hand and dragged the unresisting and still chuckling Clark down a side hall and into a room lined with computer cubicles, half of which were occupied. "Math tests first, though. Push that button if you need help, like if it's too noisy or someone's bothering you. I gotta get back to work. See you probably around dinner time."  
  
Clark grinned and watched his exit at x-ray, unashamed of using his talents in this particular environment. Wynter went down the hall and around the corner with the quickness of a typical hyperactive teenager, jogging a little, not as if he were running from or to anything, but as if he were indeed just busy and didn't care how it looked. Clark shook his head. Most of the other people in the room had glanced at him, smiled genially, and gone back to their own, presumably, lessons. He wondered how many of them were "freaks."  
  
Just before Wynter turned the corner, though, just as Clark was about to turn his attention to the computer, Wynter looked back -- as if knowing that Clark was watching -- and hollered, "And if you misuse "like" or "you know" that way again, I'll tell Lake!"  
  
The computer gave him a series of establishing questions and ID handshakes and guided him into the first of the math tests. He chuckled softly to himself. Geez, he was spending his summer vacation at school! Only this time he didn't have to hold back, in fact, he was being challenged. And the odds of someone bringing a meteorite to science class looked a little on the slim side. Clark grinned at the computer. The extra-hardened, high-speed keyboard wasn't just for him, it was standard equipment on all the machines in the room. Suddenly, all his differences in this world didn't seem to matter so much.  
  
He made it through integral calculus one in two hours, and mentally gave himself a 95%, assuming there was always a brain fart somewhere. The computer wasn't telling. (He'd gone out of his way to beat the typing test and clocked out at 3000 words per minute. The computer had seemed grumpy ever since. He could hear someone on the other side of the wall, presumably on monitor duty, still chortling.) He took one look at the next set of questions and shied away. Time for a break. He wandered out, looking around.  
  
"Clark?" The voice behind him was familiar. Clark turned and took in the sight of a boy his age, with long brown hair and bright penetrating eyes, also familiar. In the two seconds it took him to see through the changed countenance, the boy grinned and walked up to him. "Or are you going by Kal-El here? Good to see you again, man!"  
  
"Cyrus?" It wasn't the long hair that had fooled him, it was the relaxed and happy expression.  
  
"Cyrus, Bill, whatever." The boy he remembered as haunted and scared was gone. The self-confident, almost swaggering teen shrugged. "Headed for a snack? Me too. You better not be skipping out on Wynter's program, though. He'll tell Lake. And while nobody much cares about names around here, for god's sake don't call him Wynt the wart. Last time Nicole did that, he put a mechanical shark in her bunk. No telling what he'd come up with for you. Outside of Lab 8, of course. But don't even ask about the see-through shorts."  
  
Clark immediately went through a dozen scenarios involving see-through shorts, and blanched, deciding not to even mention that topic again. "It's good to see you again too, Cyrus. Bill. I never got a chance to apologize for -- last time."  
  
"You did what you had to do." Cyrus stopped and faced Clark, suddenly frighteningly serious. "If you hadn't done that, if I had been forced to live with that guilt for the rest of my life, I might not ever have been able to come back. It hurt, yes. At the time, it hurt like hell. Even Randal wasn't sure I would make it, and he's a more sensitive empath than I could ever have nightmares about being. But if you hadn't been who you are -- not what you are, but who you are -- and done what you did, then I would still be a vegetable in some clinic some place, eaten alive by failing myself. Or worse. Thank whatever gods John may still believe in that he got to me before Lionel's people did.  
  
"You made me face the truth. You gave me a conscience to live up to. And that's the only reason I could get out of that hell hole in my own mind. I don't owe you my life. I owe you my sanity. I hope you never have to know what that means."  
  
Clark swallowed, praying to whatever gods Kryptonians had believed in that his incipient tears didn't show. "I never meant to hurt you. I just knew I couldn't let you go on believing in a hope that wasn't going to ever come true."  
  
Cyrus put a hand on Clark's shoulder, very deliberately, and smiled. "Watch this trick." He closed his eyes, and drew in a slow breath. "Stop it, Clark. You bear no blame. Kal-El is not responsible for all the problems in the universe. You do what you can. We all do whatever we can. That's the definition of a good person. And you have done well. You are not responsible for the things you cannot change, or be, or do."  
  
Peace and acceptance and happiness flooded through Clark like moonlight, intangible, ethereal, unmistakable. Clark gasped. "Did you just -- how did you do that?"  
  
Bill's eyes blinked open, full of mischief and pride. "I'm a healer, my friend. The best in the world, according to John. Ever read Elfquest? Shoot. Oh well, I'll have Wynter put it on your study list. I make Leetah look like a hobbit. Whoops, mixed genres there. And I'm only beginning to get a handle on just how far I can go with the reading part. Ran says I'm so slow at getting past the block because I'm afraid I'll end up like Gem on that old Star Trek show. Hah! It's all his fault, he's the one who made me watch it. That show is so old that Kirk had to be FORCED to kiss Uhura, like Nichelle Nichols isn't still one of the hottest babes -- uh, excuse me, women -- on this planet or off it.  
  
"Never mind. The point is, I owe you a big one. You're ... you have this martyr complex, just because you think that you ought to be able to fix everything around you that goes bad. That isn't the way the world works, Clark. Kal-El. Bad things happen. To everyone. Some of it you can fix. Some of it you can work with. Some of it you can't. You're not the only one in the world when it comes to that, you know? At least you have that in common with practically everyone else in the known universe. So give yourself a break every once in awhile, okay? Or Wynter will give you more tests."  
  
Clark laughed. "Thanks for the warning. The math is tough enough, I don't think I want to even see what the psychology section is like. Cyrus -- Bill -- thanks. You can't believe how great it is to see," he gestured generally, "Things working out."  
  
Cyrus favored him with that uncomfortably intent stare again. ESP, Clark thought. No wonder Bill was always in a bad mood, being around people who were always giving him a hard time, even if only in their minds. It would be like when his supersensitive hearing and x-ray vision first kicked in, only all the time, and in thoughts instead of just sounds and sights.   
  
"Yeah," Bill said softly. "For some of us, things are A-OK for a change." He seemed on the verge of saying more, then shook his head. "C'mon, let's go raid the junk food storage. I bet Wynter and Nicole didn't bother to tell you how to fake out the lock. Probably wanted to see if you'd rip the door off. And Kal-El -- " he hesitated, holding his hand out as if to touch Clark again, stopping just a few bare centimeters from his skin.  
  
Clark experienced a moment of dizziness, gone so fast he wasn't sure if he'd imagined it, or was just tired, or needed a sugar fix. Or if something, someone, had flickered through his mind, a not-quite-expert scanning, a healing touch unhappily aborted. Possibilities danced on the edge of comprehension. Maybe Cyrus was uncomfortable touching him. Maybe he felt too much with his contact abilities. Maybe Clark scared him. All too often, Clark thought gloomily, he scared himself.  
  
William Cyrus took a deep breath. He couldn't think of any way to disabuse Clark of his self-doubt without causing him even more turmoil. Maybe Randal or John could. Someone was going to have to. Clark was hurting. Bill could understand it, a little, having been a lone freak convinced of his own alien-ness for more than a decade, but Clark had to live with the reality of that every day. And to bear the weight of a heritage he didn't even want. And the survivor's guilt, and not being able to be damaged the way his fragile friends could be, and separation anxiety, and the vicious voice in his head, and being able to do what no one else in the world could, and now wondering if he'd be forced to do something that appalled him just because it would be so easy for him....  
  
Cyrus made a snap decision and took both Clark's hands in his, just for a second, pouring a flash flood of all the healing power at his command into the alien teen. It was a gross violation of protocol and personal responsibility, but it was making him sick just to be around Kal-El and all his ragged and raw emotions. For one second, he did what he could do.  
  
Then he let go and slapped Clark on the back. Emotional control was one of the reasons Randal had made him watch even the most awful of the Star Trek episodes in all its incarnations, and he was getting pretty good at it. "Just let me know," he said in almost-unfeigned joviality, "whenever you need a hand. Hey, here's the sandwich locker. Just don't use heat vision on the bread, you'll set off the fire alarms."  
  
Clark stared at him in consternation, and wonder, and in a very alien emotion indeed: the idea that he hadn't actually hurt someone after all. Cyrus, for his part, vowed to himself to work harder at getting past the mental block that made him so afraid of sharing other people's pain, to do whatever he could do for the last son of Krypton, to whom he owed so much.  
  
Cyrus showed Clark the cheat-bypass that Wynter had snuck on the food locker, and heaped Clark with piles of sandwich makings (vegetarian cheese? Clark wondered), giggling conspiratorily. "Go hide these in your room. By the time logistics finds out we've been here, you'll probably have eaten it all anyway. I know I did."  
  
"Um, they'll know we've been here?" Clark looked around. "How, fingerprints?"  
  
Bill snorted. "Fingerprints! John hasn't used fingerprints for ID since the moon landing, I bet. Sure they'll know, but they don't really care, no matter how much they gripe. It's not stealing, it's just getting an early start on tomorrow's lunch. We're actually saving them work. It's not like they're gonna tell Lake or anything."  
  
Clark looked at him, and for a moment, so did Kal-El. Cyrus met the sudden alien presence behind the hazel-blue eyes, and shivered. "Why does everyone use that phrase?" said Kal-El's voice. "Is 'telling Lake' some particular protocol I should know about?"  
  
Cyrus braced himself against the sudden coldness. "I thought you'd met her."  
  
"Yes, she and Nicole were my" (Clark's, Clark's) "first contact with the Specials."  
  
It was the Cyrus personality, not Bill's, who had first recognized Clark as an alien, and Cyrus was the only one who could speak to Kal-El now. "Lake Anderson is a cold-blooded killer," he said evenly. "She has killed hundreds, maybe thousands, of people, with her mind alone. With a thought. She is far less human than you. And far more dangerous."  
  
Clark blanched and pulled away. Kal-El took that as a challenge. "Indeed?"  
  
Bill looked back sharply at the boy who had first befriended him, who he now barely recognized through the other's terribly suppressed pain. "You have enough on your plate right now," he said softly. "You don't want to know about the world Lake lives in." He gestured to the pile of snack food. "Go hang out and look around for awhile. I have to get back to work."  
  
Clark was left staring after him, hands full of food. Kal-El was left nowhere at all. 


	4. No Arguing With Logic

No Arguing With Logic  
  
On the bottom of the complex, on the outer edge of the southern spoke, in a section marked "training" on the map, Baron John maintained a comfortable living area with a great many communications devices, both extant and concealed. Anyone who had made it past the entry security measures at Special Operations was welcome to come see the boss any time. In practice, it was a desperate situation or a direct command that brought anyone to his door.  
  
Right now, it was both of them that had Cyrus tentatively approaching the low voices coming from within.  
  
"Come in, William," said a deep voice with an odd timbre before he reached the door.  
  
Bill poked his head around the door. Wynter was already there, along with the man (well, Martian) who had spoken. "Thanks, J'onn. I wasn't sure if I should knock."  
  
The large green humanoid with deep crimson eyes smiled. "You know yourself that your talent is better than that, and getting stronger and more controlled every day. You should not be surprised, however, that Kal-El is a case difficult enough to test your limits. He may well be the most powerful person on Earth already, and he is still growing."  
  
"No kidding." Cyrus glanced at John for permission, picked up the emotion without any physical indication at all, and flopped into a chair. "He's -- well, I knew he wasn't human the first time I touched him, and that was when he was going out of his way to try to pretend. But now -- J'onn, what did that damn spaceship DO to him? He's being eaten alive inside."  
  
Wynter looked up from the screen he was racing through. "Some kind of implanted post-hypnotic command, augmented by a forced attempt at brain reorganization. It didn't hit any of us that hard to experience it because the input was specifically geared to Kryptonian bio-molecular structure and transmission capability. What his damnfool progenitors didn't count on was the cellular alterations he'd be subjected to in a different planetary and solar environment. The AI's attack on his psychological and physiological configurations, and I'd give a lot to know if it were telepathy or plain energy or nanotech or all three, is literally at war with the neurological patterns laid down through experience and chemical substructure."  
  
Only Wynter, thought Bill, would say damnfool progenitors. "If I understood five words of what you just said, I might even be able to agree with you."  
  
Wynter sighed. "He's been breathing Earth air, eating Earth food, living under Earth's sun, for a dozen years. He's not pure Kryptonian. The computer feed directly into his brain was geared for a pure Kryptonian. If he weren't so tough, it would have killed him."  
  
"Not to mention the nurturing element," the Martian added quietly. "He's been raised to think of himself as human. An extraordinary human, to be sure, but of this planet, part of it. To find oneself suddenly become 'other' is to make one doubt all that has come before, but at the same time, it does not change the fact of all that has come before." J'onn shrugged. "I was full grown, well trained, and the veteran of a planet-wide war before I was stranded here. And still I find myself wondering, sometimes, if I have lost not only my family, but my racial heritage, by learning to fit in as a human." To prove a point, J'onn seemed to melt and change shape, until he was indistinguishable from a normal human. From Baron John, in fact.  
  
The Baron snorted without humor. "Very good, Manhunter. You are welcome to my job for a week. What about the voice in his head?"  
  
"You are familiar with phantom pain."  
  
"Actually, I'm not, since I regenerate so easily. But yes, we know the concept."  
  
"A very strong impression was forced upon his mind, against his will. You know something of the extent of it. It burned pathways into his brain that a child raised on Earth will never be able to make full use of and have a difficult time handling at all. His action in destroying the spaceship was -- heroic, but futile. The damage had already been done."  
  
"I don't agree that it was futile. Who knows what else it might have done?"  
  
"We never will, will we?" J'onn / John shifted into a more neutral appearance, with a glance at Bill, and a slight, amused, calculating look.  
  
"Don't you dare!" the empath warned. "Sir."  
  
"Ah, you see, your talent is indeed strong enough to read past a Manhunter telepath's block. Quite impressive." Bill glared at him, knowing full well that J'onn knew that Bill had read the intention purely off the Martian's deliberately expressive face. Being teased by an alien was even less fun than being teased by Wynter.  
  
"Kal-El still hears the voice impressed upon him because of the new pathways," J'onn went on seriously. "Clark, technically, does not, because Clark, whose only experiences are of Earth, is of no interest to the Kryptonian mechanism. That the child who was raised here, and the child who would have been the hope of Krypton to reestablish their culture on another planet, share the same physical brain, does not mean they are the same person."  
  
"Multiple personality disorder? He shifts back and forth with this phantom pain?"  
  
"William, until you've finished your training, refrain from making pop-psychology guesses," John said mildly. "You notice that Wynter knows better." To the Martian: "You indicated that you had neutralized the so-called voice."  
  
"I rechanneled the patterns that had caused the most damage, yes. It would have been more difficult had he not already been so badly poisoned. His resistance is still formidable."  
  
"As proven by the fact that he's still alive," John agreed dryly.  
  
Wynter glanced up from his screens again. "J'onn, can you link me to Clark?"  
  
"Not without him knowing that you're there. Too much personality conflict."  
  
"Blast. I would really like to get a direct feel for which part of his brain is doing what." Wynter frowned. "Bill, can you give me an idea of what you're getting?"  
  
Bill laughed shortly. "Wynter, I can barely read you either. Try Randal."  
  
"Randal's not a healer. Damn, damn, damn. I can't get a single decent scan past that energy aura of his. And Dylana and Nicole are both gone. John," Wynter rubbed his eyes, "I can't promise you that the hope of both Krypton and Earth isn't stone cold crazy. We might be able to stop him if he tries to suicide -- but it might not be worth the effort."  
  
John contemplated that, the Baron impassive under the anxious eyes of a powerful amateur empath healer and a child whose IQ couldn't be measured, and the brooding red orbs of an ancient telepath from an extinct race of another planet. Finally he lifted his own eyes, unreadable even to the formidable powers of those around him. "We'll do whatever we can."  
  
The common room had a huge flat-screen TV that gave Clark a headache to watch, since he kept focusing on the pixels instead of the whole picture. There was a lesson in there somewhere, he was grumpily sure, but since he had never had much interest in TV anyway, he took to reading while listening to the other conversations around him and letting the TV chatter play in the background, as a form of practice in splitting his concentration. Everyone here seemed to be better at it than he was, including the people who did a certain amount of cleaning up around the complex for the scientists who were particularly bad about it.  
  
(They were "special," too, Clark figured out pretty quickly, in the socially-accepted sense of the word. He was still mortified at himself for almost snapping at Angela when she asked if there were anything she could do to help him. He had caught himself in time -- recognizing the simple bright eyes of a permanent child in the older woman's smiling face, and then gently thanked her, and asked her to show him where the laundry room was, although he already knew -- but the damage to his own conscience was already done.)  
  
He wandered in after dinner (Nicole had been right about the garlic) and another bout of tests (he would rather have a mechanical shark in his bunk than face philosophy 101 again) and selected a book from the light comedy section, not knowing that Tim Dorsey had been labeled "light comedy" as a particularly nasty joke on the unwary (Dorsey, like Hiaasen, was considered hilarious only by people who thought hurricanes were fairly amusing, too).  
  
The tube (stupid slang for a device that hadn't used vacuum tubes in decades, Kal-El commented acerbically) was on CNN, self-important talking heads competing with screen crawls that Clark read mostly by glancing strobe-fast at it every ten seconds. No one seemed bothered by his particular method of mixed reading styles, so he didn't bother to change it. The picture itself rarely contained anything of interest, much less information.  
  
Until he caught, in one of those quick glimpses, an image that he knew far too well.  
  
"Lex!" Clark shot to his feet, drawing the attention of everyone in the room.  
  
The talking heads' tedious words and awful pictures faded in and out on him. Plane lost ... wreckage discovered ... no sign of survivors....  
  
"No!" He turned to run, and found his way blocked by half the people in the room. How had they moved so fast? "Sorry, excuse me. I have to go."  
  
"That's not a very good idea, Kal-El," one man said softly. Clark didn't recognize him, but for the very short man to have the nerve to stand in front of him, opposing him, knowing who Kal-El was and what he could do, he must have been a Special. "Everything that can be done is being done. You'd only cause yourself more problems."  
  
"Lex is my friend," Clark said, beginning to get angry. "I have to go help."  
  
"Trust me on this one, okay? Please? At least talk to Wynter before you run off. There's a lot you'll need to know before you go charging in."  
  
Clark glared, but there was no arguing with the logic of that. "Okay, I will. Just for a minute. Where's Wynter?"  
  
The short man took out his hand phone. "Wynter? Clark just found out about the Luthor crash. Yeah, I know. On his way." His clicked it shut. "Level 5, spoke 6, the observation control room. As if I couldn't have guessed." Clark was gone before he finished speaking. The short man sighed. "Well, that went better than I expected."  
  
One of the women in the barricade-the-door team shook her head admiringly. "Mustafa, you got cojones where your brains should be."  
  
"Well, not too far away from them, anyway," the Arabian midget joked, and the rest of the room cracked up at the release in tension. They had all been warned that Clark was potentially unstable. Facing down an upset Kryptonian was not in the job description of anyone from Earth, unless they worked for Baron John.  
  
Clark managed, barely, not to rip the door off the observation control room. Wynter and eleven other people on headsets had some hundred screens -- smaller and much higher resolution than the common room's flat screen, Clark was distantly relieved to note -- tuned to various news channels, and some to images that obviously were not for public dissemination. At least forty were following whatever information they had managed to find on the LexCorp plane loss. Clark scanned them angrily, wishing for high-speed playback of his own. "What's going on?" he demanded, anger warring with grief and fear.  
  
"Looks like sabotage, to me," Wynter said mildly, not turning around. "Lex had a competent pilot, and the initial NTSB reports are not consistent with any usual sort of mechanical failure, though of course there will be more to come on that one. Wonder if they'll ever find Bryce's body? Lake did mention that she was dancing with Lionel. Over you, as a matter of fact, and what she discovered in your blood sample." Clark went pale to the point of green at that. Wynter appeared to ignore him. "Was she actually in league with that wart on the butt of humanity, or did she think she was playing on a level field against him? Foolish, either way. Even if she did bail out, she'll never be able to show her face or even her credentials and capabilities again without being traced. Talk about throwing it all away."  
  
"I have to go help find Lex," Clark said faintly.  
  
"Indeed? How? We have much better swimmers and divers on the team than you, and experts with search and rescue, and Dylana and Little Sky are there to help unobtrusively with the weather. Though using Dylana's name in the same sentence with subtlety is kind of a bad joke. What, exactly, were you planning to do? Go up to the Coast Guard and say, hi, I can carry your boats out to the crash site? For that matter, could you? You're not nearly as good at flying as Lake or Sky or Dylana. Maybe you will be, someday, but one more time, Kal-El: what, exactly, were you planning to do?"  
  
Clark just wanted to throw something. Or hit something. Anything to keep from feeling so powerless. So helpless. Because Wynter's maddeningly reasonable voice was right -- there was absolutely nothing he could actually think of to do. "I just know I have to help. Somehow." His voice broke. "Please, Wynter. I *have* to. Tell me how. I know you can."  
  
Wynter swung on him, and the anger in his brown eyes and unwashed face took Clark aback. "You want to help? Good. Then sit in that chair over there and help keep watch on those ten screens. Keep notes in that halfway-functional head of yours of anything and everything, and I do mean anything and everything, that's even the smallest bit out of place, or inexplicable. If Lionel and Helen didn't conspire to kill Alexander Luthor, then I want to know who did. And if you aren't interested in who else might be after you, I most certainly am. And if you don't care about yourself, then consider that it may well affect us too. And you might try THINKING, for the first time in your life. If you want to help, then you have been given your orders. Now sit down and shut up and watch and take notes." He spun back to the screens that he was monitoring, flashing from one to another at a speed to rival Kal-El's.  
  
More astonished than he'd ever been in his life, Clark obeyed.  
  
After a minute, Wynter said gently, in a more conversational voice, "By the way, giant lightning bolts don't count as inexplicable. That's just Dylana bleeding off the cloud potentials and damping the storm. As I said, she's not the most subtle person in the world."  
  
"Um." It was, Kal-El thought, a peace offering of a sort, but not important right now. Clark was finding it hard enough to keep up with the ten screens he'd been assigned. How had Wynter and the others been managing for the hours since the crash? Some of the input had to have been coming from their own people on the scene. Clark swore he saw a Coast Guard officer wink at them through a supposedly hidden camera.   
  
"Wynter?" he said quietly, not wanting to interrupt the youngster's concentration. "That guy who called you when he stopped me from running off -- is he a Special?" Did someone a meter tall actually have a chance of standing up to me? Kal-El did not say aloud.  
  
"Mustafa?" Wynter spared him one second and a raised eyebrow. "He's a communications engineer. Mostly he fixes these lousy excuses for phones."  
  
Sixteen enervating hours later, the Coast Guard announced that Lex Luthor had been found alive. Eleven news networks, including the BBC, ran special features on Lex, calling him a hero and praising his indomitable will to survive. Appropriate condolences were expressed for the loss of his new bride. Lex begged off interviews. Wynter, who had stayed on with the crew through a shift change, called for a pizza and fell asleep in his chair. Clark stumbled back to his apartment, where he sat down and gave himself over to exhausted tears.  
  
Lex was Clark's friend. Kal-El had not been able to do anything to help him. Mere mortal humans had. So much for ruling the planet. 


	5. Lab 8

Lab 8  
  
Late the third night, driven by the morbid curiosity of insomnia, Clark wandered over to the lab wings. He'd spent a wonderful afternoon in the nanotech and laser labs, listening to geeks happily arguing geekiness in a language he was only barely beginning to comprehend, feeling his mind turning on more completely than it had ever done before, even when the spaceship's AI forced its programming into him.   
  
That hadn't been fun at all, he decided in retrospect -- that had hurt, as if flooding his brain with alien knowledge was more important to those who had sent him to this planet than letting him learn on his own, allowing him his own identity or mental integrity. To the science teams here, though, he was just another bright curious kid to be fondly, patiently indulged, and given whatever toys to play with that he wanted and that they judged he could safely handle.  
  
(Kal-El had momentarily surfaced with a snort at the thought. Like there was anything this pitiful planet could do to stop him! Then he remembered Nicole, and Lake, and Dylana, and the unknown Baron John. No telling how many of these scientists and engineers and technicians were also Specials. And even if they weren't, he was beginning to accept the idea that human minds, at least, could do things that even he would never be able to.)  
  
He'd found an out-of-phase adjustment in the laser replicators that six people were cursing at by looking straight into them, much to the consternation of one experimenter, until another one mentioned admiringly that they'd often tried to teach Nicole how to do that with no success.   
  
He'd courteously lifted a two-ton microcontroller so that an impatient mechanic could fiddle with the interior without having to schedule downtime and a platform, and listened with interest to the mutterings coming from underneath. The mechanic finally remembered that the machine he was working on was not being supported by a machine itself, and poked his head out to ask considerately if he were getting tired. Clark, who was holding a soda in one hand and the whole apparatus up in the other, while leaning against it with his legs crossed and reading from a screen across the room, just grinned and told him that this was a lot easier than fixing the tractors.  
  
He'd offered to use his heat vision to try to help with the buckminsterfullerene transformation, eliciting an excited round of speculation and enthusiastic applause from the lab techs when he melted or set on fire fifteen thousand dollars of equipment and produced nearly a tenth of a gram of carbon-60 buckyballs.  
  
He'd spent an hour in Nicole's "playroom," grunting and straining at her weights, and decided that she was still stronger than he was. He was actually being tempted to work out for the first time in his life. (He suspected that he was being monitored -- true -- but didn't much care. What difference did it make to them whether he could lift ten tons or twenty?)  
  
Wynter had chided him for falling behind in his tests. ("For pity's sake, Clark, it's only the faster-than-light cone!") He'd apologized by spending six hours after dinner going through material on the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, though the former depressed him and the latter gave him a headache trying to keep up with who did what and why they did it when they did it. So now it was after midnight, he'd already finished Asimov's Foundation Trilogy and most of the Robot series (Clark found himself sympathizing mightily with Daneel and Giskard), and his apartment held less appeal for him than the dangers of forbidden fruit.  
  
The Labs 6-through-10 wing looked like all the other lab wings. Heavily reinforced walls of various metals and/or concrete / plastic, depending on what experiments were being conducted and what protection was advised or interference protected against. Pipes of pressurized gases and various fluids, all well insulated and monitored and alarmed. (Clark had met both a former NASA engineer and an industrial ammonia boiler plant operator down here, and both were grudgingly admiring of the safety precautions.) Electrical lines inside crawl spaces that reminded Clark of the, what were they called on Star Trek? Jeffries tubes, right. They might as well be handling antimatter. Clark wasn't sure yet that they weren't.  
  
He paused at the hallway leading to the hazardous-chemistry lab section. Lab 8 looked no different from any of the others, from here, even with x-ray vision. Lead and stronger inert metals lined and dotted all of them. He hesitated, then, in the rebellious chafing against any restrictions that is typical of independent-minded people on this planet and probably any other, summoned up annoyance at being told he would have to be escorted like some kid. He grimaced, then grinned, at the thought of what his parents -- his human parents, and somehow it didn't hurt so much any more to think of them that way -- would have said. Clark Kent, if we told you not to shave the cat, not to put handprints in the wet paint, and not to put meteor rocks up your nose, you would immediately go and try to do all three.  
  
He stepped through the entrance and was startled at the soft "bong" and voice that issued from the ceiling. "Clark Kent, Kal-El. Please summon your preferred escort. If you wish, I can notify any on-duty personnel to accompany you."  
  
Clark spun around. Wow, they weren't kidding about personnel recognition sensors. He didn't see any cameras. Though the perimeter of the doorway was suspiciously warm. "I don't need -- I mean, I was just looking."  
  
"Access to this wing is restricted because of the hazardous nature of the materials stored and tested here."  
  
"Are you a computer?" Clark stayed where he was, but decided to have some fun.  
  
"If you wish to challenge me to a Turing test, then please do so from outside the hazardous areas."  
  
Turing test? Aha! Clark sat down where he was, grinning. No doubt any security computers that Wynter had a hand in would know who he was and why he was forbidden here, and could probably outwit him, but how would a human being on security detail react?  
  
"What if I refuse?"  
  
Almost as if in answer, two men and a woman appeared at the doorway. One was obviously fresh out of sleep, but the other two had the pleased expressions of people on late-night boredom details who had been given something interesting to do.  
  
"Hey, Kal-El." The woman spoke casually, with that unnervingly practice-perfect Kryptonian accent.  
  
"Kent, what the hell are you trying to pull now?" Yawning and rubbing sleep-crusted eyes. "If you wanted to run some kind of lab work, couldn't you wait until first shift?"  
  
"Oh, for -- " the big guy looked around, frowned, and walked through the doorway, which Clark now saw to be thick with sensors as they activated. "Kid, this ain't no place for you to be. Why didn't you just ask for somebody to get whatever you wanted?"  
  
Clark shrugged. "I just wanted to look around." And while I didn't deliberately set out to test your security, this is very interesting. Three people on immediate call?  
  
"Go look around the biology labs," the sleepy one advised. "Or the video room. I don't think we're doing any meteor-mutant viruses or showing Day of the Triffids this week."  
  
Clark stood up, feeling his stomach tighten but his resolve harden. "I want," he said steadily, "To look in Lab 8."  
  
The three stared at him. Then they looked at each other. Then back at him. The smaller man sighed and took out his mini-phone. "John, our newest arrival is a masochist."  
  
"So I see." The Baron's growl held no trace of sleep. "Can you handle him, Carlston?"  
  
"No prob, sir," said the bigger man.  
  
Handle me? Clark thought. He peered at the big man. Was Carlston a Special? He was obviously strong, but his body density didn't look like anything unusual.  
  
"Very well. Kal-El, if you so much as blink twice, Carlston will pick you up and carry you outside and dump you in the fountain on your ass. Don't break his arm or anything, he's under orders to do so, and he'd rather piss off you than me. Roger that?"  
  
"Um, roger, sir." The Baron's voice had that indefinable air of command that brooked of no defiance. No wonder even Lake answered to John.  
  
"Myriam, you have lead code access. Don't let him rip the doors off any of the vaults, it'll take hours to repair. If he's actually bound and determined to prove that he's mortal by making himself thoroughly sick, just because it's there and children can't resist temptation, give him up to five seconds. Then dump him in the fountain."  
  
"Understood, sir."  
  
"Jacques, I know you're tempted to queer the lock, but it won't do any good. Nothing in there is built to Nicole's specs. Just play cards against him later."  
  
The sleepy man smiled and nodded. "I'll keep that in mind, sir."  
  
"Good. Actually, Carlston, get him to the sun room if he passes out; medical can take it from there. Questions? Thanks. Out."  
  
Clark blinked at his three escorts, trying to get used to the idea of being treated as both someone allowed to make his own decisions (children, hah!), and someone fragile to be protected at all costs. The resources they were expending on his safety alone were beyond his imagining. And John just...? He cleared his throat. "Shall we? And, uh," it felt weird to be saying it, considering what he was about to do, but he owed them this. "Thanks."  
  
All three of them had to give access authorization codes to get the door to Lab 8 open, and the computer challenged them every step of the way, repeatedly pointing out the presence of "vulnerable personnel." Clark whistled to himself. When he had been a small child, he had felt safe and secure in his mother's arms, but that had been an illusion. Safety at all was an illusion in life. Nothing could protect him from himself, he knew that now. If anything could come close, though, Special Operations could.  
  
It was so tempting ... to stay here among people who called him Kal-El as easily and casually as Clark, to be where very nearly nothing threatened or could hurt him, to be not only allowed but encouraged to push himself to his own full potential, to have friends he didn't have to lie to. To have friends who could take care of themselves. To have friends, period.  
  
But something inside him told him that the easy way out was a cheat, a lie all on its own. It would be worse than accepting Lex's money and becoming his whore. It would be lazier than just sitting on his ass and doing nothing when there were people he could help with a flick of the finger. It would be a betrayal of both the parents who had given their lives and everything they had been to send him here, and the parents who had spent their whole lives hiding and denying their friends and family in order to raise and care for him.  
  
It would be living a lie in a whole different way, a denial of who -- and what -- he was. It would cost him his soul. Cyrus had clarified that for him without realizing it. Bill had gone through hell, both physically and mentally, to acknowledge his own personal truth, and he had come out the other side because he had been willing to sacrifice himself for others..  
  
Clark wasn't quite sure what his future should be, yet, but he knew his destiny wasn't to stay safe and hidden. If Whitney and a million others like him, ordinary people who were heroes when heroes were needed, could turn their lives over to service for their people and their countries and their world, then by whatever swear words Kryptonians used, so could he.  
  
That was, he realized, part of why he had needed to be here in this deadly place tonight. Not just to prove something. To discover something.  
  
The door to Lab 8 swung open, and Clark held his breath.  
  
Nothing. The place was as clean as his mother's kitchen (Martha, his mother for his whole life that he remembered, said the background voice with a pang -- Clark's mom, Clark, not Kal-El) after one of her cleaning frenzies, as sterile as any other lab, as harmless as Lana's room (minus the old green necklace and the horrid pinkness). He walked in, slowly, scanning with wide-open paranoid senses. A stacked line of small labeled vaults. Another line of matching labels on the file cabinets. Computer terminals and various instruments here and there. A faint chemical smell from acids and bases and detergents. A lab. Big deal.  
  
He turned to Myriam (Doctor Delarissa, he remembered belatedly) and inclined his head. "If you please? I don't want to have to rip a door off if it causes a problem."  
  
She sighed. "G. Gordon Liddy has nothing on you, and that is not a compliment. Command, computer, vault one," the one nearest the door, "six two one five oh, level three, authorization green red blue white red, voice ID, check."  
  
It took all three of them again, and the computer fought them even harder, until finally Jacques did something by passing his hand over the lock. "Five seconds," he said softly. The heavy door unlocked and opened a crack. Clark felt faintly queasy, but that was nerves, not radiation, since the small door was still all but shut. He closed his eyes for a long second and took a shallow, deliberate breath. He could do this. He had done it before.   
  
He needed to do this. He took one step forward and pulled it open.  
  
The pain hit first, like a solid wave, ripping fire in every nerve. Clark gasped and staggered. There was never really any way to prepare for it. He could brace himself, and fight not to show the terrible effects -- he'd had to, more than a few times -- but it took so much out of him just to keep his expression blank that there had to be a really, really good reason to make the effort. Like if Lana were watching him. Or Lex. Or Lionel.  
  
His gut muscles convulsed from the shock. Icy sweat ran down his face with the rising fever. Radiation poisoning added its more debilitating nausea as it built. The room swam around him through the pounding in his head, and his vision faded to a cold semi-conscious tunnel of gray and green. His legs gave way. He fell to his hands and knees with a low moan, holding his stomach, no longer aware of anything except the poison that was killing him. He wanted very much to pass out and get it over with. Self-descriptions like "idiot, moron, stupid" flitted distantly through the agony and life-draining weakness leaching at his mind.  
  
Them the torture stopped, just like that. The sound of locks clicking shut got through the crippling dizziness still blurring his senses about the same time that he realized he had been picked up like a child and was being carried out of the room and wing at a run. "I'm okay, I'm okay," he managed. "Put me down. I just need a few seconds. On solid ground."  
  
Carlston stopped and lowered him sitting to the floor, holding him upright. "You sure you're not gonna be sick or pass out? You still look pretty bad."  
  
Clark put one hand to the floor to keep it from moving around and rubbed his eyes with the other. The aches were already all but gone. "No, I'm fine." How many times had he excused himself with that lie? How many of them had believed it? Carlston clearly didn't. But the debilitating effects did fade pretty fast, even at night, when his superfast metabolism had to draw on internal resources to heal without the restoring power of direct sunlight.  
  
It was tempting to go to the sunlamp room. Would that be admitting to a weakness, or flaunting a strength? Clark sighed. Didn't matter. Either way, it was just something else that made him different.  
  
Then again, Dylana stole electricity right out of the wiring. Hah. Why did they even have a sunlamp room, anyway? Were there other solar-powered mutants here? Clark snorted to himself as his mind began to come back online, still not risking a deep breath quite yet, but regaining his sense of humor. More likely, it was because most of the techno-geeks -- their own words for themselves -- never went outside, and had to be ordered to get their vitamin D activation dose while still connected to their beloved labs and instruments and computers.  
  
Jacques and Myriam came up behind them, Lab 8 and the 6 through 10 wing both sealed and guarded again, and the computer no doubt in a bad mood at being defeated in its purpose. Clark anticipated a tough time with the tests in the morning. The AI team included some people who were not averse to turning their creativity to vengeance.  
  
"Are we all done with the craziness? I still have orders to toss you in the fountain." Carlston was clearly going from unhappy to on the P.O.'d side.  
  
Clark smiled, a little shaky but under control. "That might not be such a bad idea."  
  
"I'll @#$%^! say," a new voice put in. Clark glanced up to see Cyrus in his underwear, long hair nearly as unkempt as Wynter's, madder that five wet hens and one newly-woken bear. "Clark, if you ever pull a stunt like that again, I will HIT you. I could hear you scream from a mile away. I don't even want to think what condition Randal is in right now, unless he blocked you as soon as you came up with this hare-brained idea."  
  
"I didn't scream," Clark protested meekly.  
  
Cyrus tapped his head. "Ohhh, yes you did. Come on, Carl, we owe this dork a dunking. And we gotta figure out a proper penalty for when Jacques creams him at poker."  
  
"Hmph." Clark got to his feet, almost completely recovered, but still subdued at the display of concern from the four people now surrounding him. "X-ray vision, remember?"  
  
The other four gave him mysterious smiles. "Won't help."  
  
With a shout of "One! Two! Three!" Jacques and Carlston (Clark had objected to being carried again, but remembering John's orders, allowed himself to be dragged) swung a giggling Clark into the central fountain, eliciting unappreciative comments from several windows around about it being a little early in the morning, y'know? Cyrus jumped in on top of him and put a foot on him, at which dare Clark stood up and balanced Bill upright and overhead by said foot on one hand, like a trained seal with a ball on his nose. Myriam winked at Cyrus and snuck up behind Kal-El and rubbed against him, causing Clark to yeep and drop Bill, who, having been forewarned, did a credible back flip and landed pretty well in the water. Jacques rummaged in the pool for a penny and sat back on the ledge, flipping it idly.  
  
"So what the hell was that all about, kid?"  
  
Clark sat down heavily in the water and wiped his forehead, for all the good that did. "I'm not sure I can explain it. Are you guys Specials?"  
  
Jacques grinned, and Myriam raised a finger. "Eidetic memory, clairvoyance, a psycho-telekinetic talent for making machines do what I want. I was lucky, my parents thought it was nothing worse than a girl engineer in the family. John found me when I started getting strange results out of all the instruments in college. He wanted me to work on the cold fusion team instruments, but I seem to be psi-blind on that particular subject."  
  
Carlston shook his head. "Nope, just ex-of world-wide wrestling. Closest I ever came to Warrior Angel was wearing a mask. The Baron picked me up because I liked to read. And knit. Not something you'd expect in a smackdown. No Talents, though."  
  
"I think my mom would consider both of those talents," Clark said mildly. My mom, he thought suddenly. My biological mother probably doesn't even know what knitting is.  
  
"You're avoiding the question." Cyrus was sitting on the edge of the pool too, and though he was obviously shivering, his attention was focused completely on Clark.  
  
"Want a warm-up?" Clark offered, knowing with a sinking feeling that Bill had him there, game, set, and match. "I can keep the heat vision on low power, you know...."  
  
Sure enough, Cyrus shook his head. "Not until after you answer the question."  
  
Clark looked down and swallowed. That the empath would rather be cold and wet than let Clark off the hook told him just how much he needed to do this. "I feel kind of stupid, saying this to you guys. You know all about what it's like to be different. Alone. Wondering what your purpose was. Why you were blessed with this oddness, or cursed with it. But my whole life, I had to live a lie, and still be lectured every day that I should be honest and straightforward. I had to be careful not to use any unusual abilities where someone would see, and I had to use what I have or watch people suffer or die. I'm a farm kid, and I'm from another planet. Hypocrisy drives me crazy. And hypocrisy is practically my middle name.  
  
"And I don't have any choice in the matter. Those awful rocks are the only time when who I am, what I am, is totally clear, that I'm not lying to myself or anyone else. It's also the only time that I'm not an invulnerable alien," he caught himself before the word "freak" slipped in, "who can't be hurt, or can't understand what other people go through, or can't even have any contact with the rest of the world. The only time I feel ... normal."  
  
Silence all the way around the fountain. The depth of emotional pain that had driven Kal-El to try to gain acceptance through physical pain would have killed Cyrus if he hadn't had training at Randal's feet. He swallowed, and moved over to touch Clark. Clark shrank away from him, knowing that the contact was unpleasant for the empath, not knowing that to leave Kal-El in this state hurt the healer far worse. "I'm not going to force it, Kal," he said quietly. "I can't, not when you're putting up walls like this. I'm not nearly as good as Randal, and I hope I'd kill myself before I'd live with the power or even the thought of being able to rape your mind the way a psychotic psi-fire like Lake could do."  
  
That was the wrong thing to say, and Clark and Bill flinched simultaneously. Because Clark did have very nearly that kind of power, and the thought that he might someday use it in such a fashion was exactly what did terrify him.  
  
Bill swallowed carefully and recovered by sheer force of will. "You think I don't understand? I've been there. I can only offer. But I would appreciate it if you'd accept."  
  
Clark looked up at him and fought back tears that even being soaking wet would not disguise. "You're -- I mean, thanks for trying. But I don't belong here. I don't belong anywhere. Nothing can change that, not you or anyone else. I'm. Not. Human."  
  
"Shall we play a game, my young friend?" Jacques broke in casually, still flipping his penny. "Heads says you're human. Tails says you're not."  
  
"What...?"  
  
The broad grins of the other two clued Clark in that he was being taken, but he settled himself and surrendered with a mental sigh to the old tired pretension at normalcy. It pushed the hurt away, sometimes, for a little while. "OK, heads and tails it is. Best two out of three?"  
  
Jacques met his eyes, and Clark realized for the first time they were a startling amber, like a cat's. "How about one out of a hundred? If you get one tails, you may declare yourself not human." He handed Clark the penny. "Someone keep score here."  
  
After the penny came up heads 88 times in a row, Clark shook his head and gave up, acquiescing to Bill's soul-warming power. 


	6. Dylana

Dylana  
  
The next day, Wynter put Haldeman and Hambly on his required-reading list. Clark began to suspect an alphabetical pattern. Van Vogt was in the proscribed section.   
  
If he had to go through Heinlein (and he hadn't finished Asimov or even half of Arthur C. Clarke), to get there, he'd be old and gray before he reached the proscribed section anyway. But it was Hambly's wizards that awoke a secret delight in writing for Clark. He taxed the computer at full speed with a fan-fiction story, and immediately erased it, not having a clue what kind of monitors and safeguards Wynter had put on the backups. Wynter howled and interrupted John to show him Clark writing about himself in a world of working magic.  
  
It gave them both hope that maybe Clark was going to recover some of his old self.  
  
Clark was in the common room with a book that he wasn't much paying attention to (Statistics for Dummies) when someone flopped down beside him uninvited. He was startled, and a little annoyed, until he realized, a second later, that it was Dylana. Oh.  
  
"There's the kid from outer space himself," she said wearily. "At least you're not watching that corporate-crud dis-info excuse for news."  
  
"You -- Wynter said you were helping the search and rescue people." Clark pushed away his own instinctive resentful reaction at her words. "I ... well, thank you. I looked for you. I wish I could have helped."  
  
"If you had seen me, I would have been sorely disappointed in myself." Dylana raised her head and her voice to a corner in the room. "You hear that, Wynter? I am not THAT bad at subtlety. I can hide in plain sight when there's a reason to." She sat back, obviously exhausted. "Any chips and dip around here? I could use a beer."  
  
Clark made prosaic use of superspeed, careful to stay just under the sound barrier while inside, to raid the junk food rooms. Six bowls of dip, three kinds of chips, and eleven seconds later, he paused to ask, "What kind of beer?"  
  
"Anything dark and not in a can. Anyone ever tell you that you're cute, kid?"  
  
Clark blushed, grateful that Dylana couldn't see it. Then the slow smile she turned on him reminded him that she could "see" the entire electromagnetic spectrum, including heat.  
  
He blushed harder. She laughed, and ruffled his hair. "Go splash cold water on your face, kid. I imagine every girl and half the guys tell you that all the time. Me, I could give a hang what you actually look like. I'm older than either of your mothers, and more of a pain in the ass than both of them put together." His blush paled, and she obviously caught it. "Sorry, that was rude, and nothing you deserved. Go take a time-out, kid. And don't forget my beer!" she added as Clark took her advice at something more than normal human speed.  
  
Clark broke into the liquor locker without too much trouble. Locked doors in the complex were considered tests, not blockades. He paused in front of the refrigerated section, and put his head against the cool metal, still hearing that offhand remark about two mothers.  
  
He had cost one her only natural child. He had left the other behind to die. He could never repay either of them for what they had sacrificed to let him live.  
  
Nicole had told him that no one would abandon him. Nicole could throw him through a wall (and had) with one hand. She had no reason to lie to him. Nicole could feel physical pain on a very, very limited basis, even less than he could. But she could be hurt by threats to her friends just as easily as he could. She had responded by retreating to this emotionally secure place (when she wasn't out interfering with the whole world), where her only close friend was another, even more dangerous, superhuman. Nicole's parents, such as they were, had been the lab technicians who made her.  
  
No, these people would never abandon him. But they had willingly abandoned a great deal else, to save their own sanity. They had chosen not to be part of the outside world, to instead only occasionally touch on it. To work in the service of all mankind -- but never to have any friends among them, never to be one of them.  
  
Clark. Kal-El. Yes, I can be both. I have to be. I can be a farm kid, and from another planet, because I am. I don't have any choice in the matter. That's what I am.  
  
He procured four different beers and relocked the locker without too much damage. No doubt Wynter would make him fix or pay for the one latch he'd accidentally snapped.  
  
"Wow," Dylana commented tiredly when he set the beer selection before her. "Service with a smile." She selected one, and waved at the rest. "Siddown, kid, unless you have anything better to do. Want one?"  
  
"Um, I'm underage." Pure reflex.  
  
Dylana's startled laugh made him cringe. "Does alcohol even affect you?"  
  
"I'm not sure. Probably not much." Dylana seemed to elicit candidness, even more than Nicole did. Well, Clark reflected, it wasn't every day he was invited to sit down with a Nobel laureate. "I, uh, don't much care for the taste, anyway."  
  
Dylana nodded. "It's an acquired pleasure. You wait, though, you'll get old too, someday." She swallowed a large gulp of beer, and waved the bottle at him. "Go get something you like, then. Give you something to fiddle with while we talk."  
  
"Um...." Clark dithered, trying to think of a way to get out of what he was pretty sure would be a much too intense conversation.  
  
"Don't tell me you're so enthralled by Wynter's assignment in statistics that you can't spare a few minutes to talk." Her blind eyes and penetrating senses evaluated him. "Unless I make you uncomfortable?"  
  
How had she known what his reading assignment had been? Was he talking to himself? "I -- actually, I didn't want to bother you. I thought you just might to, well, want to relax for awhile. After all you've been through." You took on the storm. For Lex. For me. At a cost to yourself that even I can't understand. You're killing yourself.  
  
"I did not come in here to watch Moonie-owned talking-head propaganda," Dylana said sharply. She drank some more beer. "Nicole was right, you know," she sighed. "There are very few walls on this planet I can't "see" through. I knew where you were from half a state away." She brooded for a minute, very uncharacteristic of the worldly devil-may-care wielder of lightning. "I didn't come waltzing in while you were here by accident."  
  
She picked up another beer, and flicked the cap off without touching it. "Lead doesn't block my altered senses the way it does yours. Even hard vacuum is a library to me. When the time comes, I'm going to fly as high as I can and see all there is to see." She drained the second beer. "Good choice of beers, kiddo. Thanks."  
  
When the time comes...? "That sounds like a ... like ... um ... well...."  
  
"Like what?" Dylana tilted her head at him. "Kid, you really need to work on your communications skills. There's a Toastmasters chapter here that meets on Saturday nights."  
  
Clark took a slow, careful breath. (A Toastmasters chapter? He could only just barely imagine the practice speeches that Special agents would give.)  
  
Dylana was waiting. "It sounds like, you, well, like you're planning on ... finality."  
  
Dylana leaned back on the couch. She pointed her face at another beer, but didn't reach for it. "Child, I don't have more than another year left at best. Nicole didn't tell you? I thought it was common knowledge."  
  
Nicole had given him the impression that Dylana herself didn't know. Clark stopped breathing. A sample from Lab 8 in his throat would not have hurt much more.  
  
Dylana turned her face back to him. "Clark. Kal-El. The great new invention that I screwed up by sticking my head in the wrong place at the wrong time was a remote medical diagnostic instrument for astronauts. I'm a walking autodoc. You haven't gotten to Larry Niven yet? Never mind, you will." She lifted a finger at a beer bottle, and it rose and came towards her, drawn by the metal cap. She made the top fly across the room and caught the glass bottle as it fell, so fast he could barely follow. "I know exactly and to the cell how much of me is coming apart. The only thing I can't pinpoint to the minute is how much longer I'll be able to fly." She drained half the beer. "And dying slowly in bed just doesn't appeal to me."  
  
Clark stared at the floor and swallowed. What, possibly, could you say to that? Sheer desperation allowed him to find a small version of his voice, blankly, a ridiculous but absolutely necessary change of subject. "Dr. Cartak ... why do you wear white boots?"  
  
Dylana turned her face towards her legs. "They're white? Oh, for ... no wonder my kids think I'm insane. I just thought they were old lineman's work boots. You know, for the rubber sole, so I don't accidentally electrocute anybody. I'm going to fry Nicole for not telling me. I bet she's been laughing her plastic and metal head off."  
  
"Well, I mean, there's no reason why you shouldn't wear white boots if you want to. Nicole's," his first impulse was to say "underwear," and he blushed at the thought, "Bodysuit isn't exactly subtle either, with all that red and black."  
  
Dylana hooted. "Thanks for telling me, Kal. Gives me some ammunition for when she gets back." She sighed, almost contentedly, finished the third beer, and tossed the bottle over her shoulder. Startled, Clark started to catch it -- and saw it land dead center in the recycling receptacle. And Nicole had said she was losing control! Or maybe, since she knew she was dying, it really was all a game to her.... Was she trying to tell him something?  
  
Dylana clarified it by waving her hand in the general direction of the other two empties, which she could "see" only because there was metal in the labels. "Your turn."  
  
Clark realized that she was deliberately steering him away from the more difficult subjects. Turning his attention to something easy. Playing a game. With him. For him.  
  
It would be a poor response on his part to refuse the offer.  
  
"Hm." He gaged the distance and angles, turned his back, and tossed one in each hand. One made its target, the other bounced off the edge. Dylana doubled up in laughter. "Bad news, Clark. The chapters on ballistics tomorrow are going to be extra tough." Her mismatched eyes twinkled. "If you want, I can get my son to tutor you. He's working on the mission to Pluto launch right now, but he'd be perfectly happy to take time out to meet you."  
  
Clark started. "Your son? But I thought you didn't get along with...." His voice faltered, the last memory of the way his own parents (his, Clark's, not Kal-El's) had looked at him burning behind his fireproof eyes. "Your children...."  
  
"Who told you that noise? They think I'm nuts, and I think they're taking themselves way too seriously, but we get along great when we all get together maybe once a year. When we're not yelling at each other and insulting each other's taste in food and pets and recreation and habitats. And when my ex-husbands remember to bring their own beer to the family reunions. And when Jeremy's cousins don't try to set new speed records with whatever hideous contraption they've built with parts stolen from Wright Patterson that week."  
  
Family reunions? "Do they know about...."  
  
"The mutation? Well, of course. I was sick for a month after going electric, it would have been pretty hard to cover up completely. Though John did pull me out of the hospital and into specialized rehab before I blew the wiring in the hospital, so they mostly don't know everything I can do. Killian does, because I had to move pretty fast to help get him and his buddies off the launch tower they blew up. And the family does have to know the medical consequences. But none of them much care that we turned out to have jumping genes."  
  
She pointed at the last beer. "Sure you don't want it? Oh well, we can always make you a pina colada." She stuck her fingertip to the cap and lifted it with a magnetic twist. "We're still family, Kal-El, even if half of us are mutants -- you don't even want to imagine what Delores keeps in the petri dishes in the refrigerator -- no matter how little DNA we have in common. We watch each other's back's, even when we're watching out for each other. Hah, both of those lines could mean the opposite of what I meant. That's Anglic for you."  
  
And then, she did something that shocked Clark almost as much as opening the vault in Lab 8 had done -- she repeated the phrase in pure, unambiguous Kryptonian. " 'The ones you care for the most can hurt you the most, the ones you care nothing for can only kill you.' "  
  
She chuckled at his change in blood pressure, and went on as if nothing unusual had happened. "We fight like wildcats and wolverines as often as not. But anyone who tries to hurt any of us is in for, well," she tilted up the beer, "a surprise. And not just from me."  
  
A "surprise." Well, Clark could empathize with that. His whole life had pretty much been an exercise in "surprises." Like being told that other people couldn't pick up ten times their own weight. Or finding out that there was a spaceship -- his -- in the storm cellar.  
  
Like sitting around with a dying Nobel laureate who took time out to tell family stories and quote platitudes in a language from a dead planet. Like the idea that a family could be so ... diverse. And fight half the time. And still be a family. Still care.  
  
What he'd meant to ask, though, was: do they know you're dying? If they do, why aren't they here? Why aren't they spending your last year with you? It would have surprised him greatly if someone as flamboyant as Dylana Cartak could keep the secret of her powers from her family, especially since the rest of her family sounded equally difficult to impress. But he had no intention of reopening the subject of how they felt about losing her.  
  
"Well, then," Clark said carefully, "Yeah, I think I could use a tutor, if it's not an inconvenience. Wynter is a little -- insistent, about keeping up with the lessons."  
  
Dylana laughed and threw her last beer bottle over her shoulder. Of course, her senses extended in a complete sphere, so it wasn't as if she weren't "looking."  
  
"Isn't he, though. Wynt the twit had better learn to pace himself, or he'll burn out before he's old enough to vote. His metabolism is already overstressed." Dylana stood up. "Come on, Kal. Since you're going to be in detention tomorrow anyway, we may as well take a break and get some practical lessons in ballistics." She held out her hand, and Clark took it automatically, not knowing what else to do. "Let's go flying."  
  
"What?" Clark froze. (Oh yeah, real superior race there.) "Oh, you mean, we can use the plane?"  
  
"The plane!" Dylana scoffed. "You use that head of yours for anything except blushing, kid? How am I supposed to read the instruments? No, I mean FLYING."  
  
Clark swallowed, stalling for time. Well, duh, of course Dr. Cartak would know what he could do. "I'm, I -- I don't know. Lake taught me to fly. A little. I'm not very good at it."  
  
"Practice makes perfect." She gave his hand a short, impatient tug, knowing full well that she couldn't budge him, also knowing full well that his ingrained habit of deference to experience and authority made him putty under the weight of her reputation. Dylana grinned. She was not averse to cheating when it came to manipulating a Kryptonian. "Come on."  
  
Clark followed.  
  
Flying with Dylana, Clark thought in dazed excitement when the doctor dragged him up into the air, was nothing like learning to levitate under Lake's careful psycho-telekinetic touch. Being in contact with Dylana's wild talent, her body's almost furious argument with the magnetic and gravitational field of the planet, was like playing with lightning. Literally.  
  
Passing through the cloud layer on their way to ten miles high, Dylana paused, stretching her arms and legs in sheer pleasure. Clark, hovering unsteadily beside her -- and Wynter was right, he wasn't very good at flying, and would have been even less balanced if Dylana hadn't been holding him in place with a magnetic field that had already ruined his zipper -- felt around uneasily. There was lightning in the clouds.  
  
Dylana wasn't at all bothered by the electrical potentials. She was reaching out for it.  
  
And the lightning answered.  
  
The puny bolt she had annoyed Clark and Nicole with had, in fact, been an example of control. Here in the unfettered sky, ten million volts or more found a pathway and came together under her command. White fire exploded, cloud-strike to fingertip. Every hair on Kal-El's invulnerable body stood straight out in the burning bright. Dylana was laughing, head thrown back, as she took on the full power of nature in a contest of wills.  
  
The image was seared onto Clark's invulnerable eyeballs for all time.  
  
Dylana glowed, filled with power, a star unto herself. The roaring crackle exploding around her fed her, exalted her, worshiped her. The blazing force struck her and struck her and struck her, and she struck back, shouting, wielding the slashing electrons like a whip.   
  
Clark cringed in his corner of the sky. Not from the lightning, which really couldn't hurt him all that much even at this power. But from the dying human woman transformed indisputably into a goddess, a being probably forever beyond his ability to comprehend.  
  
When the time comes, she had said. This was what she had been talking about.  
  
No, someone who had tasted the power of a goddess, who had matched herself against Zeus and Odin, would not be content with slow deterioration and death in bed.  
  
Clark wondered -- if he had been born human, been altered by accident, would he have had the courage, or the need, to use the red stone? To let go of everything, and just do what he wanted with whatever life was left to him? Was that what Dylana was doing?   
  
Or was she doing exactly the opposite? When the cloud's potential was finally exhausted, she turned to him, pure exultation and no questioning of her destiny. She reached for his hand, sending a tingle through him that was not just physical, and urged him higher.  
  
Above the cloud layer, the sky was alive with stars. Clark forgot all about statistics. 


	7. Jonathan, and, um, Lake

Jonathan (And, uh, Lake)  
  
Jonathan Kent sat wearily on the exit room couch. Hospitals couldn't be bad enough without having to wait through checkout paperwork? he snarled to himself. At least Martha didn't have to go through it. Then again, she was still signing exit paperwork herself. From a wheelchair. Small consolation.  
  
Their baby was gone. The small miracle that they hadn't believed possible for almost two decades was suddenly there, and then gone. And they had to fill out paperwork about it.  
  
Their other baby, their son, the stranger from a strange land that they had taken in, their very large miracle, was gone too. Because of him, Jonathan reminded himself, rubbing salt in his own wounds because he couldn't forgive himself any other way. Because he had stupidly given in to one minute's temper tantrum.   
  
The child who had trusted them utterly, who had meekly obeyed them when he could have broken them with a finger or fried them with a glance, had run from them. Because he, Jonathan, had let himself get wrapped up in his own selfishness, had failed to realize that the boy might be blaming himself too. Jonathan knew full well that Clark felt guilt over hurting a fly. He remembered clearly now what he had been too self-absorbed to see when Clark pulled them out of the overturned truck: the boy's horrified expression, his terror at what he believed that he had unknowingly, unintentionally, caused in his desperate defense of his own life.  
  
Jonathan remembered that he hadn't even spared the concern to notice at the time that Clark, too, had been badly injured. Jonathan hadn't even thought to ask his invulnerable son how he'd managed to get so bruised and cut up, why his hand (that he'd flinched from using while working them free) was burned to blisters, fingertips charred nearly to the bone. Clark had been very nearly crying with injury and remorse, ashamed that he couldn't do more.  
  
And Jonathan had ignored him, taking the alien's resistance to harm for granted.  
  
Clark had admitted to stealing Lionel's kryptonite key. Not that Jonathan gave a damn if someone stole Lionel's entire empire. All he had heard was his son saying "stole."   
  
It hadn't even occurred to him at the time to wonder how terrifying it must have been for Clark to face Lionel, knowing he was in possession of that pure refined damned poison.  
  
Clark said he had had to destroy the spaceship. Jonathan heard only "destroy," the loss of the unique curiosity that he had kept around on the off chance that it might be useful some day. He hadn't understood then that to his alien son, it was the loss of everything, the only thing, that linked him to where he had once come from. That the child had chosen to give up his own heritage, to keep from having to give up those who had adopted him.  
  
Jonathan put his head in his hands and wondered if he was going to throw up.  
  
His son had put himself through nearly lethal hell (God, how could he have made himself pick up that killing horror in his bare hand?), and sacrificed everything he had of his birth parents and home world, to try to protect his adopted family and friends. And Jonathan had raged at him for it, blamed him for what was not his fault. And lost his son.  
  
Because Jonathan had not understood that their son was more scared than Jonathan had ever been, even as a kid grunt in combat, and for much the same reason. Except that Clark's own mind was the battleground, and he himself the enemy. Because Jonathan, the adult, couldn't be mature enough to remember that Kal-El was also still just a kid.  
  
("No voice?" he'd asked, as if it were a joke. Clark had averted his eyes, given him a weak smile and a subdued assurance. Any father who couldn't read such a lie in his child didn't deserve the responsibility, much less the privilege, of being called father.)  
  
Martha would kill him when she found out Clark was gone, and why. Jonathan contemplated killing himself first. He would have given absolutely anything to take back that one minute in time when he had taken out his frustrations on a tortured teenager.  
  
("Why didn't you tell us? You didn't think this through!" God.)  
  
When he had given in to his volatile temper, and lost his son.  
  
A small pale woman in a state trooper's uniform approached him "Mr. Kent?"  
  
"Yeah, that's me," he said tiredly. As if the whole county didn't know by now.  
  
The light-eyed woman handed him a clipboard. "Sign here, please."  
  
Jonathan looked up at her, angry and suspicious and somehow afraid. "What is this?"  
  
"What does it look like, Mr. Kent?" the woman said, brutally sarcastic. "Your license is being revoked for multiple instances of reckless driving. It doesn't matter whether you sign it or not, but we are required to get your acknowledgment that you have been informed."  
  
"WHAT -- " Jonathan jumped to his feet.  
  
Instead of retreating, the small woman moved closer to him, crowding him, glacier eyes narrowed. "According to the scene report, you were driving at over sixty miles per hour as you approached an intersection with a clearly posted limit of thirty-five. You actually managed to flip a truck over, twice, which, according to my forensics people, is not easy to do, because you were speeding and driving recklessly. If your wife had been injured or killed, you would be charged with battery at the very least, perhaps manslaughter or negligent homicide. Count yourself lucky that you are only forbidden to drive until further notice." She ripped off the top sheet and tossed it at him. "Your court date and legal information are on there. You had better hope you can read it better than you can a speed limit sign."  
  
"Hey!" Fury overrode Jonathan's common sense as he grabbed for the woman. Bad move. Attacking a police officer was not a good idea under the best of circumstances.  
  
Attacking Lake Anderson was something not even Kal-El would have dared to do, but Jonathan could be forgiven for not recognizing who he was dealing with. Lake was very very good at undercover work. She restrained herself from breaking his wrist as she spun him and twisted the offending hand up behind his back in a casual movement.  
  
"Your weapons will also be removed from your home until you have completed a series of psychiatric evaluations," she said coolly, giving his arm just enough of an upward nudge to let him know that he was in the hands of a superior power, even if she was a foot shorter. "I suggest that you get some counseling for your lack of self control." She shoved him, lightly but expertly, and Jonathan went to the floor before he could scream.  
  
"Considering the condition your son was found in," she told him, using the ugly tone she'd learned from their police agents who had accepted John's offer of employment after seeing far too many dead children, "You could as easily also be charged with child abuse."  
  
Jonathan's anger did not abate, but he suddenly had no air to yell with. "Cl-Clark..."  
  
"He is in protective custody, and under psychiatric care," Lake threw at him. "He was in a state of near cataplexy, complicated by an as-yet-unidentified form of radiation poisoning." Let the Kents chew on THAT one, Lake thought grimly. They knew exactly what kind of radiation poisoning. It ought to get their attention that someone else might find out. "If our investigation turns up proof that you were the cause of his condition, you will certainly face charges. As it is, you are at this time the most likely suspect."  
  
Jonathan's weather-beaten face went white with a terrible combination of habitual rage and a whole new fear. Good, Lake thought. Maybe the sod-buster would start thinking about priorities for a change. A million people a day had a miscarriage. There was only one Kal-El. And if it took the threat of becoming known as a child abuser to get that through to him instead of beating him up with his own conscience, well, whatever works.  
  
"And by the way, Mr. Kent," she added in a voice so cold and dark it did not seem to belong on Earth at all, "your son still loves you, though I can't imagine why."  
  
Lake stalked off, shoving her officer's cap back in disgust. John was going to flay her alive. She was supposed to have met Nicole in Israel yesterday morning. But someone had to get it through Kent's head that his actions had consequences, and that it was high damn time that he grew up and learned to control his temper at least as well as he expected his kid to do.  
  
Jonathan lay there on the floor and stared after her in absolute stupefication.  
  
He didn't know how he was going to face Martha, after everything they'd lost.  
  
But even that conversation was infinitely preferable to knowing that someday, somehow, he was going to have to meet Clark's eyes again. 


	8. Little Sky, and no, it's not R rated

Little Sky (put your tongues back in your mouths and get your minds out of the gutter)  
  
Clark slumped before the computer and restrained an impulse to put a fist through it. He settled for rubbing his eyes instead. Languages! The eight languages of Krypton's history were child's play compared to Latin and Greek. Granted that the symbols and roots were so thoroughly ingrained in a dozen modern languages that he would never learn German (Caesar, Kaiser) or Spanish (and who put genders on inanimate objects anyway?) or even French (were they competing with Welsh for most incomprehensible spelling?) without them, but if Greek hadn't been the roots of everything from Russian to math, he would have said to hell with it and set out to rule the world by starting with teaching everyone a logical language.  
  
And Wynter had threatened him with the Arabic languages if he fell behind again. He shuddered. No doubt Lucy Karp (Tanenbaum had been put on his reading list as a prelude to legal studies) was based on an actual Special here, who was making him pay for his sins.  
  
A gentle hand laid on his shoulder and thumbs massaged his neck. Clark started, and then went limp. He hadn't had a neck rub since, well, ever in his life, that he remembered. He recognized Little Sky's scent before he blinked up and saw her. "How did you do that?"  
  
"Do what?" She moved her hands to his shoulders and worked them in light circles. Clark melted. She was, he thought, still incredibly beautiful, but there was none of the aura of sheer sexual attraction that had so unnerved him on their first meeting.  
  
"Make me, well, feel that. I don't actually feel much any more. I mean, I can feel a touch, but it doesn't, um...." I am digging myself into a hole here, Clark thought, and wisely shut up, even as his body took over and automatically leaned back into her hands.  
  
Sky laughed lightly. "It's part of my talent, Kal-El. My heritage is the power of the elements, in the oldest sense. I am one with the flow of life and nature, the daughter of the Mother Goddess. The fire and wind and rain are not the only currents which speak to me. So does the blood and," she stroked his spine and he shivered all over, "the lightning within."  
  
"I'm not from this planet," he muttered, making no attempt whatsoever to move away.  
  
"You are alive, my friend. You are here among us. You, yourself, have brought forth life from the land of this world, with your own hands and work. That makes you part of this world, no matter what others you also belong to." Working on a farm counted toward being human? Clark thought muzzily. "Call it a Special's mutation talent, or call it the ancient power of a direct line to the spirit of living Gaia, but I know that you are one of my own -- our own -- because you share the aura of the Mother's touch."  
  
"Oohhh," Clark mumbled, relaxing more completely than he had in, well, his whole life. "Does your power include turning invulnerable aliens to jelly? Because you just did."  
  
Little Sky chuckled in a low suggestive voice completely at odds with her light laughter, and bent to brush his neck and ears with her lips and a whisper that held no words, as she reached to the chair's controls to recline it. Clark barely retrained himself from jumping through the ceiling, and that only out of fear of smashing her head. "Don't do that!"  
  
"Sorry." Her hands shifted to stroking his head, a purely maternal gesture, despite the fact that they were closer in age than even he and Lex were. (Maternal. When was the last time his mom had ever comforted him like that? -- Clark's mom, not Kal-El's mother, who had barely ever even touched him, and damnit, that lack of something he probably never would have had anyway hurt way worse than it should have, since he had only barely been hatched when he had been sent away -- what the hell? where had that thought come from?)   
  
Clark suddenly felt as dizzy as if a green rock had been strapped to his head. He dropped his face into his hands, carefully controlling his breathing. "Not -- your fault."  
  
"It most certainly is my fault, because it is something I alone did, and on purpose, though it is not something that I usually have to apologize for." She lifted his head with her fingertips, massaging lightly and in soothing motions against his temples. "Even John, even Lake, permit us the enjoyment sometimes."  
  
"Permit...." Clark decided that languages weren't so bad after all, if this was the reward for studying. He leaned back and let go. "Enjoyment...." His eyes drifted closed.  
  
"Yes, Kal, enjoyment," she said softly, keeping up the slow gentle pressure-point touch to release tension. "This is a very beautiful world, if you will let it be. Earth welcomes you, and loves you. Sometimes she speaks to me in frightening storms, or burning drought, or terrible fires. Sometimes the crashing of her continental plates destroys so much that even I must cry, why? But in the end, our mother nurtures all life, and all that can be. Earth is the home of all possibilities. Birds that swim, fish that fly.... Earth is your home, too. You are just one of our many wonders." She moved her forehead very close to his, not touching, just enough to hear his breathing even out towards sleep. "If you were not one of us," she said softly, pushing the chair's control to lean it back, "I would not be able to touch you."  
  
Clark murmured something that might have been "touch" if he hadn't been halfway to REM cycle. Leia Makani, wind of heaven, Little Skylark, *touched* him with the gift she had been called "freak" for until she became one of Baron John's: the power of Earth.  
  
The feeling of belonging to Gaia. Of being one with the land and sea and sky.  
  
Leia Little Sky released him and retreated silently when he started to snore.  
  
Wynter and John and the South America team were arguing fiercely over the information coming in from seventeen channels when Sky barged in. She didn't bother to knock, her ability to sense earthquakes coming (and sometimes ease them a little) put their discussion at only about a 3.5 on the Richter scale. "Who wants to hear about Kal-El?"  
  
John turned to the rest of the team. "The Kryptonian's information is not restricted from you, but you people are going to have to put the Ecuador operation together with what little info we have, as of ten minutes ago. Get moving." They did. "What now, Sky?"  
  
Skylark helped herself to a chair. "Well, Dylana and Nicole were right, no surprise there. The boy is so close to emotional collapse that it's a wonder he's not catatonic. Wynter's lessons are the only thing he's scheduling his life around. Not that he appreciates it all that much, Wynt," she smiled lightly at the younger boy. Wynter growled. The partner of the winds and waters was one of the few people for whom he didn't dare put a mechanical shark in her bunk. She might return the favor with a real one.  
  
John steepled his fingers and frowned at her, which reminded Little Sky where she was and who she had interrupted. "Yes, Dylana couldn't help but notice the physical instability, as well as some residual radiation damage. How about the rest of it?"  
  
Sky shook her head. "It took everything I had to get his interest when he first got here, and he didn't have any defenses at all then. Now he's got walls up that even I can't get through. Goddess, John, he opened a vault in Lab 8 with his bare hands, just to see if he could feel anything! He was only mildly surprised that I could give him a neck rub, when I was channeling enough life force to get YOU into bed."  
  
John smiled slightly, and Wynter whooped. "You're on! Let's see you try it."  
  
"Wait a few years, Wynt, and I'll show you. John, sir, there's really nothing else I can do. He doesn't respond to the usual cues. He's as highly arousable as any teenager, at least he responds with the usual reactions to stimuli, but the interest is, well, feigned. As if he's only feeling something because he's been told he should."  
  
"He's not human," Wynter pointed out.  
  
"Don't start, Wart. He's as human as they come. He grew up on this planet."  
  
"That's what I mean," Wynter clarified impatiently. "Emotionally, all he knows is what he's been taught by humans, until that all-gods-damn download screwed up his head so thoroughly. He responds to the cues he's learned. Feigned, as you said. But physiologically, he has nothing in common with us except general shape. He's no more physically human than Nicole. If he can interbreed with humans, I'll eat a sample from Lab 8. He doesn't HAVE an instinctive sex drive or preference, because there's nothing and no one on this planet he can reproduce with. All your mother nature's turn-on power does to him is frustrate him.   
  
"By nature, he's as likely to be turned on by a dolphin as by anything you or Kurt could do. At least a cetacean is closer to his strength class."  
  
"And while he has remarkable self-control," John added quietly, "There are few forces that could withstand his loss of it, for whatever reason."  
  
Little Sky considered that. To her senses, Kal-El was just another boy, one laboring under a terrible burden. She had to remind herself that he could also be terribly dangerous, even without meaning to. Most of the rest of them were dangerous only on purpose.  
  
"So what next? Randal?"  
  
John made a small motion of his hand. "That's up to Randal, of course. But William has already reached the same wall you have." He smiled a little, not pleasantly. "Kal-El survived on his own all these years by being a tough nut to crack. We should not be surprised that it's working against him, and us, now." John turned away, his attention going back to the information feeds that even Wynter had trouble keeping up with. The other two recognized the signal for "get back to work," and stood. "But I'll talk to him tomorrow," John promised. 


	9. Mustafa gives Clark a much needed kick

Just a short scene in which Mustafa kicks Clark in the knee. So to speak.  
  
Clark woke languidly, and decided to wander the halls that night again, though he stayed away from the Lab 6-to-10 wing. No point in waking up anyone. (Well, maybe Jacques. He owed the man serious payback for that drubbing at poker and the revenge Jacques had exacted. Yeah, he had known the odds against the penny coming up heads like that were insane, but twenty two royal flushes in a row? If they'd been playing for more than pocket change, Clark would have had to go rob a bank. As it was, the crazy man had upped the ante with each bet until he demanded, literally, the shirt off his back. And pants. Right there in front of everyone, all laughing themselves sick. Clark's ears still heated up at the thought of the publicly forced near-striptease. If he could have been certain that Jacques was asleep and would have been one of the ones summoned for guard duty, he would have risked super-speeding in and ripping the Lab 8 vault door off just to get even.)  
  
"Don't you DARE." The voice behind him caught him off guard, and when he spun around in automatic guilt, there was no one there. At his eye level, anyway. Looking lower down, he recognized Mustafa, the engineer who had prevented him from running off and doing something really stupid by simply standing in his way, armed with nothing but sheer human courage. Clark gulped at being caught. "Don't ... what? I wasn't doing anything."  
  
"You were THINKING of doing something stupid again." Mustafa planted his hands on his hips and dared Clark to deny it. Coming from someone that Lana could have beaten at arm-wrestling, the challenge should have seemed ridiculous, but it wasn't.  
  
Clark smiled weakly, a little sadly. "What, are you a telepath?"  
  
"If John has any telepaths here, they're smart enough not to let him know it. Kal-El, you wear your emotions like a neon sign. Even these lousy phones John has stuck me with could tell anyone on the other end what you're thinking. People give you a hard time, for fun or not, and you give yourself grief to make up for it. That's on the not-mentally-healthy side, you know? I'm not calling you crazy, but I am saying it's something you ought to think on."  
  
"I've thought on it." Clark's voice went distant. "I cause grief to other people. There doesn't seem to be anything I can do to make up for it. When I try, I usually make it worse."  
  
"You're feeling sorry for yourself," Mustafa said sharply. "You're stronger than just about anyone else on the planet, you have senses and capabilities most people could only dream of, you're tall and good looking by the standards of nearly every society that ever was, and you're feeling sorry for yourself. You don't have the smallest idea what it's like to be discriminated against. Buy a clue, kid. Some of us would kill to trade places with you."  
  
Clark turned burning eyes on him. "You can have it."  
  
"Really? Try being from a culture where manliness is measured by strength. And height. And the willingness to commit suicide. Your stupid stunt in Lab 8 notwithstanding, boy. Since you're not an agent, and still have to be protected from yourself, that's not quite the same as standing in front of a tank. Or in Lake and Nicole's case, a Chernobyl. John took me in because I was the only survivor of a bomb that killed the rest of my family."  
  
Clark staggered backwards. He'd known about Lake, well, sort of, but this was a level of brutality that Smallville had not prepared him for. "Your ... I'm ... sorry."  
  
"Yeah, well," Mustafa waved one hand, "Being short has its advantages. Something you'll never know about. Though of course you do know about losing the whole family thing. Waking up with blood and pieces of flesh all over you, though, you can probably do without for awhile. Just don't get too freaked when it does happen someday. You can live with it. I did. Of course," he reflected, "I'd already seen a lot of other crap by the time I was twelve."  
  
Clark had seen a lot of other odd things by the time he was twelve too, but he didn't think learning that he was a dozen times stronger than anyone else counted in the same class as watching your friends and family blown to shreds and waking up with.... He felt hollow and sick in a way even Lab 8 couldn't do to him. "I'm ... I'm sorry," he whispered painfully.  
  
"Not hardly your fault, now is it, kid? You hadn't even gotten to Earth yet. And even if you had, even if you could have done all the things you can now, what would you have done? Try to stand guard over every family in every country on the planet? You think somebody isn't being blown to bits every minute of every day? Go watch comm central."  
  
"I -- I did. When, when you told me to go to Wynter about Lex. There was so much...." Clark closed his eyes briefly. "I'm only beginning to get an idea of how much there is to do. And how impossible it is to do it all. But I have to try, Mustafa. I have to do something to make up for how much pain I've caused, even when I didn't mean to."  
  
Mustafa snorted. "Oh, Allah, a martyr complex. Don't ever let Lake know about that. You really don't want to know what kind of consolation you'd get from someone who's killed more people than you've probably even met. Before she was your age. On purpose."  
  
Clark swallowed. This safe, sheltered environment held unexpected trap doors.  
  
"Oh yeah. The reason I came looking for you. You got a telegram. Normally I don't personally deliver telegrams, but this one's from Lake and Nicole." The communications engineer handed him a piece of paper and went purposefully on down the hall.  
  
Clark looked after him, feeling as if he'd been hit. Several times. Maybe Kal-El was invulnerable to emotions, but Clark wasn't. He flipped open the single sheet of paper.  
  
HEY KID. DESERT SUCKS. BUGS SUCK. PEOPLE OK. FOOD SUCKS. WORK SUCKS. WISH YOU WERE HERE. NIKKI & LAY.  
  
Nobody but Nicole called the deadly psycho-telekinetic "Lay."  
  
Clark wondered if he ought to be amused. 


	10. Randal

Randal  
  
Randal found Clark back in the testing room, muttering imprecations in Kryptonian at the computer's deliberate, it seemed, attempt to ask questions that couldn't be answered. There were no limits to how crazy an AI team could make pattern recognition. Randal chuckled. "Most of us can understand what you're saying, you know. Tough lesson?"  
  
Clark spun around at nearly full speed and blushed just as furiously. "No, I, uh, didn't realize. I mean, I knew Dylana did, well, I guess I should have, but everyone? Uh, sorry."  
  
Randal leaned against the desk and folded his arms. "You're better at cursing than at apologizing, I see. That's a good sign. Means you have a healthy attitude towards life in general." He held out his hand. "We haven't been formally introduced. I'm Randal."  
  
The empath who had saved William's sanity because he was an even more sensitive esper. Clark gulped, regarded the outstretched hand, and took it gingerly. "Clark."  
  
"Good to finally meet you." Clark, Randal noted with interest, not Kal-El. He straightened. "Let's take a break. I heard a suspicious rumor about cinnamon buns in the admin area which needs to be investigated. Purely for material control purposes, of course."  
  
"Um, I better not. I'm already behind on my testing schedule." Clark wasn't sure if he was more uncomfortable being around Randal because it might be unpleasant for Randal, or because he was pretty sure the empath could read him like a book.  
  
"To Wynter, the whole world is always behind schedule. Including John. Ignore him. I'd put sleeping pills in his chocolate milk if I thought I could get away with it."  
  
"Oh well. In that case." Randal had, he realized, just offered to make him a partner in recreational crime. He grinned and stood. "We had better go make a thorough examination of those pastries, then. You won't tell Lake, will you?"  
  
Randal groaned. "Not even Wynter and the AI team would dare try to pull a stunt like what they've been doing to you on Lake. You can tell her about the pattern recognition tests yourself. Wynter will be days fixing the computers."  
  
Clark snorted. It was tempting.  
  
The rumor about the cinnamon buns turned out to be true with a vengeance. Clark could smell them from a level away. His mouth watered the way it hadn't since....  
  
Since he was much younger, "helping" his mom bake cookies....  
  
Oh, hell. Clark gulped and turned away. It was true what they said about scent being a powerful memory trigger. All those happy days, in a warm baking-smells kitchen, sweet dough straight from the pan (something he and Pete had both done), hot cookies right out of the oven (something no one else could do, mom had cautioned him). Wonderful memories.  
  
Gone forever. No longer his. Not his family. Not his life. Not his world.  
  
Randal's hand on his shoulder almost made him bolt. Through the wall. How could the empath stand to touch him? How could anyone? He destroyed people's lives. He hurt everyone he cared for. Clark clenched his jaws and fought himself back under control.  
  
"Childhood ends for all of us," Randal said gently. "Even Angela has some idea of what she's lost along the way, and what she's gained. Growing up hurts. But growing up, learning from experience, seeing the world with new eyes every day, is what living beings do. Elves may be forever young, but even they do not stay innocent. Tinkerbell was a cartoon. And not a very good one, at that. Even a good cartoon has emotions, and can be hurt."  
  
Clark's automatic protest that the other did not understand died in his throat. Of course Randal understood. Randal would have gone irrevocably insane, as Cyrus nearly had, if he had not learned to deal with every horror that was inflicted on everyone around him.  
  
"It's not -- growing up, that hurts," he whispered. "It's -- losing things. People."  
  
Randal turned Clark to face him, his grip incredibly strong for a physical-normal human. Randal found a certain amount of comfort in working out with cold iron. "People die," he said in a voice as calm and solid and unthreatening - to Clark, at least -- as the weights on which he took out his frustrations. "That doesn't mean we've lost them."  
  
Clark realized that he didn't have to answer. This close, the empath probably knew what he was thinking before he did. He closed his eyes and tried halfheartedly to pull away.  
  
Randal held him by sheer force of will. "You haven't lost anything. Clark. Except your illusions. And your innocence. Which you would have lost anyway, sooner or later."  
  
Coming from anyone else, that would have been a platitude. From someone who had experienced at least as much pain as he had, it was a brutal truth. Clark wondered how Randal maintained such walls around his sanity. He didn't think he'd ever be able to.  
  
I know," he allowed, defeatedly. "I mean, Whitney went off to war. He gave his life for a cause that most people don't even know about. What have I lost, compared to that? An old spaceship that only wanted to order me around, big deal." And the illusion of being loved.  
  
"And you kept the language, anyway." Randal's eyes had an actual glint of humor. "Being able to curse in mathematics is going to catch on, I bet. Like Klingonese. Though personally I preferred Mork from Ork." At Clark's honestly uncomprehending look, Randal chuckled. "Never mind, I'm dating myself. Though we should probably put it on your study list, as an example of how to cope from being from another planet. It's an old TV comedy."  
  
"An old TV comedy about being from another planet?" Clark said in disbelief.  
  
"And having odd abilities, though nothing like yours. And learning to cope with emotions. And about people who care for you, no matter who you are or what you do."  
  
Clark's face shut down again. The only people who cared whether he lived or died were freaks too. And he couldn't stay here forever. He would have to go out into the world where he was alone again, because, as Nicole had put it, that was the only way he could justify his existence. Maybe he could partner with Nicole and Lake. At least he wasn't as likely to hurt them. That is, if they wanted an untrained teenager who screwed up so much.  
  
Randal stared at him, but he refused to look back. They had found the pastries, anyway. He followed the empath smoothing his way into the crowd of strangers, trying to copy Randal's friendly open smile. He used to be good at smiling, he remembered.  
  
Back when he was living a false life. Someone else's life. Someone else's world.  
  
Randal procured five cinnamon buns and handed him four. Clark blinked at him, coming more or less back into the present again. "Aren't you hungry?"  
  
"I'm over thirty, Clark, I don't need as many calories as you do. Eat up."  
  
"I don't really need that many calories either." Clark gulped a bun anyway.  
  
"You will if you try to go flying with Dylana again. Her reflexes are near speed of light, too. Don't dare her to any races, flying or running or driving. She cheats."  
  
"Sounds like Pete," he mumbled through another pastry, memory automatically dredging up the numerous incidents with Pete's treatment to, of, and by, cars. Then he flinched, and put down the pastries. Pete was gone. They were all gone.  
  
Randal glanced at him and brazenly lifted another pastry. "Hey!" someone protested. "Five bun limit."  
  
"It's for my son," Randal explained. The other nodded. "...Oh. Okay."  
  
Randal pointed at Clark's abandoned pastries and gestured. "Bring those and come on. I can see we've outstayed our welcome here." Clark obeyed without protest -- what was the point? What else did he have to do? He decided to eat another bun on the way anyway.  
  
"I didn't know you had a son," he said after a minute. "Is he a Special too?"  
  
Randal gave him a look Clark couldn't quite read, a small smile, a little sad. "Yes."  
  
"What's his talent? If it's any of my business. If you don't mind me asking."  
  
"Of course I don't mind. We can all be candid with each other here, Kal, haven't you learned that by now? We're safe here. Anything anybody doesn't want to talk about, they'll tell you to butt out, and you're not supposed to take offense, but neither are they." He took out his mini-phone, which had been crazily personalized. "Monitor, where's my boy Andy?"  
  
"Level four, spoke two, men's room." Clark couldn't tell if that was a computer.  
  
"Thanks." He clicked the silly-looking thing shut. "GPS," he said by way of explanation, at Clark's look. "Anyone carrying a phone is also carrying a locater beacon. Handy in emergencies, but abusing the privilege will get you a talking-to by John."  
  
"Oh." Clark could see how that would be an effective deterrent. There were worse punishments than being dumped in the fountain. "Do you have to ask John to get a phone?"  
  
"Nah, ask anybody in communications. But you have to wheedle them to get it customized, especially if you want something ridiculous like this." He grinned.  
  
They headed down spoke two, and Clark paused. "Maybe we should wait until he finishes his business in the men's room?"  
  
Randal shook his head and grinned again. "I don't think he'll mind us interrupting his mopping the floor. But you can check if you like." He tapped the side of his eye.  
  
Clark flushed at the suggested x-ray vision invasion of privacy. Then the words sank in, and the embarrassment faded, forgotten. Mopping the floor...?  
  
Randal pushed aside the door. "Andy! I stole a cinnamon bun for you."  
  
The boy, about Clark's age and size, looked up, with the eyes of maybe a five-year-old. "Daddy!" He dropped the mop and ran to be enveloped in a mutual bear hug. Then the boy, easily stronger than Randal, pushed him back reprovingly. "You shouldn't steal, daddy."  
  
"Well," Randal said in an exaggeratedly conspiratorial voice, "The nice lady let me steal it, so it was really a pretend. She let Clark steal one too." He turned Andy to face Clark, one arm still on his shoulders. "Andy, this is Clark Kent. His other name is Kal-El."  
  
Andy held out his hand gravely. "It's nice to meet you, Clark Kent Kal-El." He frowned at the difficult pronunciation. "That's a hard name."  
  
More than you can possibly imagine, Clark thought in the dim recesses of Kal-El's aloof mind, and was immediately ashamed of himself. "Yes, it is sometimes," he said gently. "It's nice to meet you too, Andy. Just call me Clark."  
  
The boy's grin was so completely without any deception, so free of any tainting emotion, that it hurt. Clark remembered his dad smiling like that, once upon a time. He wondered if he ever had, even as a ... five year old.  
  
"Clark. I always wanted to meet somebody from another planet," Andy said happily. Then he turned his attention back to Randal, as if meeting someone from another planet was just another experience to be collected, like a baseball card. They ALL knew, even the...? And it didn't set him apart or even seem that important at all? Clark felt dizzy.   
  
"Daddy, I fixted missus Bole's hamster today!" he boasted.  
  
"Did you now! Did Bill help you? Or did he tell you that you could do it by yourself?" Randal frowned. "And Andy, the word is 'fixed.' Say it right."  
  
"Fixed," Andy repeated, still having trouble with the truncation. That he'd even attempted "Kal-El" was a testament to his determination. "I did it all by myself, daddy. Bill was there to watch, of course. You told me never to do stuff like that alone."  
  
"That's right. Healing takes a lot of work to get it right. Bill got in a lot of trouble trying to do it all by himself, remember? He hurt himself."  
  
"I know. I can even feel him hurting sometimes. But he got better, right?"  
  
Randal nodded. "But it wasn't fun for him. You don't want to go through that."  
  
"No." The boy shook his head. Then his eyes got wide. "Daddy, if I can feel Bill hurting, maybe I could try to help fix him? Maybe I could help people too someday?"  
  
"Maybe." Randal smiled fondly. "We'll work on that. Can you feel me?"  
  
"Well, of course," the boy scoffed. "I can feel you even when you're not here."  
  
"Very good." Randal had known they were in tune since the day the child was born, but it was still a pleasure to have the boy tell him so. "How far away can you feel me?"  
  
Andy's eyes went distant with thought. "I could feel you that time you got real hurt. And you were in ... California? Is that right?"  
  
It was Clark's turn for his eyes to go wide. They were on the east coast.  
  
"That's exactly right. And that's very good." He'd been shot in the gut, for krissake, it was a wonder he hadn't blown the circuits of every empath on the planet, but it was still an encouraging sign that the boy both remembered it and could pronounce "California."  
  
He turned his son to face the alien again. "Can you feel Clark?"  
  
Clark found himself facing intent eyes almost the same hazel as his own, frowning with concentration, mirroring ... something. Andy lifted a hand. "Can I touch you?"  
  
"It's not just a courtesy," Randal offered. "You can say no, and with no offense."  
  
Clark shook his head, and then bowed it. He gave over his hand, palm up this time.  
  
The tall youngster took Clark's hand between both of his own and closed his eyes. A puzzled expression crossed his face, then it went blank. His mouth worked. He spoke.  
  
In perfect Kryptonian. "This is our son, Kal-El. Protect him...."  
  
Shocked astonishment on everyone's part broke the link. The young healer empath stared around him wildly. "What? What did I do?"  
  
"You did good," Randal said softly, enveloping his son in trembling arms. "You did really, really good. As good as anything I could do. Better."  
  
Andy frowned. "Dad. It's 'you did well,' not 'you did good.' But thanks anyway."  
  
Randal went so pale that Clark thought he might faint. Clark considered the simple easy solution of passing out himself. Or running. He settled for steadying both of them with a mutual leaning on each other, putting his arm around Randal to hold him up.  
  
Which also brought him back into contact with Andy, who was still frowning. "Jeezus, Kal-El, so it was you that nearly gave me a heart attack when you pulled that stupid stunt in Lab 8. I've heard of sackcloth and ashes, but you take the cake. Dad and Bill both were sick for hours. I thought I was dying. Don't do that again. Or I'll tell Lake."  
  
Randal's mouth worked for a long minute, eyes unable to blink. Clark seconded the feeling. Randal struggled himself back to something resembling rational thought with hard-won discipline and stared at his son, gulping. "This is an -- interesting development."  
  
Andy smiled, still the completely innocent smile of a five-year-old. "It's easier to think in Kryptonian, dad. I didn't get much else from Clark, because I'm not smart enough. I'm still, you know, low IQ. But the language makes so much more sense. I could talk better in the math-symbol language, but I can use what I got for translation, too. Kind of an idiot-savant thing. Like Rain Man, sort of, except with healer-empath contact capability."  
  
Rain Man. "Bill is going to freak," Randal observed disconnectedly, faintly.  
  
"Bill already knows, and is already freaked, but not nearly as much as you." The boy threw his arms around Randal's neck, voice suddenly breaking. "All these years, I could feel your love, but you couldn't say it in words I could understand. Can you feel how much I love you, for never thinking any less of me, for never giving up?" He pulled one arm away, eyes wet, and turned to Clark. "Come here," he ordered through the near-sobs, and Clark's feet obeyed without conscious volition. Andy wrapped him in an arm strong enough that Clark suspected that healer-empath might not be his only talent. "Kal-El, I wish you were an empath too. You can't imagine what you've given me. That for the first time in my life, I can tell my dad that I love him, and have him know just exactly how much I mean it."  
  
"I could always ... feel it," Randal said huskily.  
  
"Yeah, of course you could." Andy sniffled. "From a, a baby. Someone who was always going to be dependent, someone who was never going to be able to grow up."  
  
"Andy, Andy, don't." The pain in Randal's voice was solid. Clark couldn't breathe.  
  
"Nobody lies to anybody here, remember?" Andy managed in a half-whisper. "Especially not empaths and people who can see through walls." His arms tightened. "People who really love each other trust them with the truth, even when it's awful sometimes. Sometimes the things that hurt the worst are the things that mean the most."  
  
Clark gave up fighting and let the tears come. 


	11. Randal and Andy and Cyrus and Wynter and

Randal and Andy and Cyrus and Wynter and....  
  
It was a distinct battle for Clark to decide whether to eat dinner in the commons or grab something and hide out in his room. In the end, he chose the commons. Being alone would tempt him with too many morbid thoughts. But he chose a table by himself.  
  
"Care for some company?" Clark was about to make a snap answer when the four presences registered. Randal. Andy. Cyrus. And Wynter. Oh god. Give me Lab 8 any day.  
  
"Did I ever tell you I hate broccoli?" Andy asked Randal, seating himself.  
  
"Many thousands of times. But all children hate broccoli."  
  
"I don't," Wynter put in. "It's one of the first genetic hybrids, you know."  
  
Andy rolled his eyes. "Like you're a good example of children. I'm never going to actually be normal, Wart, so don't start on what's changed. But I've decided I like broccoli."  
  
"You're allowed to get away with calling me Wart exactly once. Ask your dad about the see-through shorts. And broccoli is a very interesting plant. Take cauliflower...."  
  
"Please!" said Randal and Bill and Andy and Clark in unison. They looked at each other and laughed. "Clark has a trace of empathic talent after all," Randal said.  
  
"Really?" Wynter put down his fork and his eyes glittered with the prospect of experiments. "How would we go about testing that? It's difficult to get an EEG on him."  
  
Clark felt himself go cold at the word "testing," and Bill and Andy both paled noticeably in response. Clark cursed at himself. Bad enough that he could kill with a finger or a glance, but with an involuntary thought? Must be what Lake felt like sometimes.  
  
"That was just an observation, Wart," Randal said deliberately, far more controlled. "Any empath can tell when someone else is in tune. You don't have to wire him to anything."  
  
"You are definitely asking for some invisible clothing. And what's the problem? You volunteer for EEGs all the time. Even with Dylana in the loop, which, for Kal's edification, is my definition of Lab-8 level masochism."  
  
"Ever heard of the word 'phobia,' bright boy?"  
  
"Really?" Wynter peered at Clark. "Sorry, I didn't realize. Have you been reading the sci-fi crap about testing on aliens again?"  
  
"I'm not even through Diana Wynne Jones yet, much less Silverberg."  
  
"You're not allowed into Silverberg until you turn 18. Or even John D. MacDonald, for that matter, though he doesn't do aliens. Smut, you know."  
  
The empaths threw back their heads and laughed. "Oh, like you're so sexually experienced!" Randal shouted loud enough for the whole room to hear.  
  
"I am going to put aphrodisiacs in your water and sell tickets. Clark, I'm sorry, I didn't think a simple EEG would bother you. I do it as an excuse to have someone cut my hair. Just, it would be really interesting to have a couple of comparative records on you. It would take special equipment because of your invulnerability aura, yes, but it's not invasive, except of your brain waves. It's not as if we're going to shave your head or cut you open."  
  
Shave his head? Clark thought about that, with vaguely distracted interest. The Lex look? Maybe he could go with a mohawk.  
  
The thought of Lex was a downer. Yes, Lex was okay now, but he would never see his friend again. Not his friend, Kal-El reminded him. Not his species. Not his world.  
  
He saw his own depression reflected on the empaths' faces and reigned in his emotions, tiredly. What did it matter, really? If they had been going to lock him up in Lab 8, they could have done that already. This was just another test, just another experiment. Just another baseline for another freak. Easier to let them do as they wanted, and feel nothing.  
  
"Okay, whatever. I probably ought to go along with SOMEthing to pay the rent."  
  
Cyrus and Andy looked at each other, and Bill stood up. "You know, we didn't get a chance to look at Meria's parrot yesterday, and she'd kill me if she lost Samson. He's only twenty. Wanna help?" To Clark, offhand: "Samson's an African Gray. They're really smart, and they can live fifty years or so, but they get sick easy. If you'll excuse us?"  
  
Well, that sucked, Clark thought, sinking lower. He'd just chased off two people who had tried to be friends with him, and probably hurt them, to boot. Story of his life.  
  
Randal cocked his head at Clark, but spoke very obviously to Wynter. "You might actually have to use kryptonite to get through that thick skull of his. On the contacts, maybe. At least a few green-coated electrodes" -- Randal tapped his fingertips against the sides of his head in demonstration -- "Would give him something to think about that we could analyze."  
  
Wynter bounced out of his chair in instant fury. "Have you lost your -- ! Oh. Yeah, I see what you mean. Hitting him over the head with bricks hasn't gotten his attention so far."  
  
Clark's first reflexive sick helpless terror at the suggestion gave way to true and pure hysteria. Clark stared from Randal to Wynter and began to giggle. The giggles built until they were choking him, until he couldn't sit upright, until he was folded over on the floor. Until they turned to sobs, and Carlston came in and discreetly helped him to his feet.  
  
Carlston raised an eyebrow at the two Specials, and Randal nodded. "My room."  
  
Wynter wiped his forehead. "Thanks, guys. I'll be in comm control."  
  
Clark was never quite sure if he had passed out. There was a confused period of mixed-up memories, and then he was lying back on an unfamiliar bed with a cool wet cloth over his eyes and a warm hand stroking his head. A slow soft voice was speaking nonsense words. English, Latin, Kryptonian, he didn't care. It was just a voice. A comforting presence. Someone to watch over him. Someone trying to save him from himself.  
  
He lifted a hand that should have weighed tons, but actually weighed nothing at all. Really, nothing weighed much to him any more. No solid walls could stop him, and none could shield him. The weight of guilt and sadness drowned out any other weight that could be put on him. Tiredly, he took off the cloth that was about as effective as the spider-silk blindfold Nicole had first put on him. Nothing, not even lead, could keep the hurting away.  
  
"Back with me?" Randal said gently. "Bill wanted to try to help, but he still isn't quite good enough at blocking. He was afraid he might lose control."  
  
"HE was afraid?" Clark laughed harshly, and cut himself off before he degenerated into hysterics again. "Well, of course he was afraid of me. Who wouldn't be?"  
  
"Kal. El." Randal's voice was stern as steel. "He was afraid of what he might do TO you. A healer's powers are not to be trifled with. You think your first arousal-driven heat vision was dangerous? Imagine what something very similarly out of control could do at a cellular level."  
  
That got Clark's attention. And even, though he was reluctant to admit it, interest. "I don't understand. Are you saying that Bill's -- and Andy's -- healer talent can, well, cause harm, too?"  
  
"Have you read Greg Bear's Blood Music?"  
  
"Um, that's on the proscribed list." Clark discovered that he could recover almost as fast as he lost it, whether green rocks were involved or not. He sat up, letting the biology lessons of the past few days roam free in his mind. Healing, when disease was involved, meant more than just making you feel better. It would require the ability to manipulate and restructure -- oh geez, cells, genes, viruses, molecules. Clark's eyes widened. Oh yes. A healer could take you apart at the molecular level. If the empathic healers hadn't been forced to feel what they were doing, they would be almost as dangerous as Lake. "Oh."  
  
"Oh," Randal echoed, mocking. "At least Wynter's lessons are starting to sink into that thick head of yours. Maybe we won't have to use the kryptonite headset after all. Sorry," he added hastily, when Clark's stomach tightened on a reflexive gag at the thought. "I know better. I was with you through the whole Lab 8 self-flagellation, I know it's not a joke."   
  
The empath sighed and sat back. "It's a wonder you've survived this long, as much damage as you've taken without even trying. But you go out of your way to hurt yourself. Why, Clark? I've been with you, emotionally anyway, for almost two years, and I still can't understand why you torture yourself. About everything. And I've been through the girlfriend thing myself, I wanted to call you up and laugh both of us silly when you were mooning over Lana and being afraid of trying to keep up with Chloe. I once asked Dylana for a date."  
  
Clark sat bolt upright, forgetting kryptonite altogether. "You ARE crazy!"  
  
"No kidding. And she accepted. Someday I'll tell you about it. But we're off topic. I know why you're ambivalent with girls, and with guys too, for that matter." At Clark's wide-eyed attempt to protest, Randal cut him off with a snort. "Most powerful empath on the planet, remember? And spent a night with Dylana? Try lying to me, and I'll tell Lake.  
  
"You were right about trusting Pete. And you're right about not completely trusting Lex, I'm sorry to have to say. You do have a trace of empathic talent, though it's nothing worth training. The problem is that you block at random, not knowing how to stop the bad stuff, not being able to pick up the good, because you have this stupid, alien, idea that you don't deserve anything good." Randal stared at him, narrow-eyed. "Why, Clark?"  
  
Clark dropped back onto the pillows, rubbing his head. Not being able to lie to someone was something he had wished for his whole life, and it was turning out to be a real pain in reality. "I dunno," he muttered. This was something he had always wished he could tell his parents and friends. About how weird it was, just being there, just being from another planet, just being -- the only one. Never mind all the things he could do, all the so-called gifts that he had to be so careful of, and with. It would have been easier to be weak, he thought sometimes.   
  
Then he remembered what it was like for people who were actually unable to climb stairs, or read, or hear, much less unable to kick over buildings or see through walls or hear through concrete floors, and he wanted to go stick his head in a vault in Lab 8 in shame.  
  
Randal's hand gripped his, surprisingly forcefully. Hah. Maybe Randal had more talents than just being a horrifyingly sensitive esper, too. "Why, Clark?" he repeated again. Randal leaned in towards him, intimately close, eyes blazing. Clark shuddered, and retreated.  
  
He wished he could put into words how they could never understand. Except that Randal could, in a sort of second-hand way. Except that Randal didn't have so much to blame himself for. No one else could know what it was to be responsible for all the bad things that kept happening, and to have given anything to fix it. And never be able to. Because everything that had gone so wrong was because of who he was. What he was.  
  
Randal leaned back, and released him. "Do you want me to torment you some more?" he said coolly. "Do you want me to tell you that you did Andy no favor by giving him just enough language to realize that he was retarded? Do you want me to explain what you did when you violated his mind? That the relationship I had worked so hard for over the years with my son is gone now, and I have to start all over to rebuild something different?"  
  
No. Randal couldn't have ripped that wound open any wider if he'd tried, not with anything, green or otherwise. Clark shut his eyes on a sob and wondered if he could kill himself. Even with all the safeguards, there probably wasn't anyone, even if Nicole were here, who could stop him from breaking into Lab 8. He turned over and curled up, willing Randal to leave. He thought of leaving a note. Why bother? Who to? What could he say, besides that he was sorry?  
  
And suddenly Randal hauled him upright, blazing eyes less than an arm's length away. "Don't. You. Dare," he hissed. And slapped him.  
  
Clark suddenly wondered what it was like to have a heart attack. Because he was pretty sure his heart had just stopped. His hand lifted to his stinging cheek in disbelief.  
  
"How dare you?" Randal demanded, shoving him back onto the bed in fury. "How DARE you? How could you possibly be so blindly self-centered as to believe that everything is because of you? My child was born mentally disabled because of MY mutation. Because of the uncontrolled sensitivity that nearly killed me as a child. Do you think I haven't felt guilt about that every day of my life? I knew I was running the risk of putting him through the same kind of suffering that I nearly didn't survive. I didn't even consider that there might be worse things. How DARE you try to believe that you are the only one who carries burdens?"  
  
Put that way, Clark could only wonder distantly where all the oxygen in the room had gone. Randal -- an empath, an enormously powerful sharer of emotions and pain -- was furious with him. An empath was furious with HIM. Not for NOT taking responsibility, but for trying to take responsibility for something he wasn't responsible for.... Clark gave up on trying to understand words and fought for just a handhold on reality.  
  
"I am NOT going to tell you a lie like that just because you want to hear it," Randal said, dangerously low. "Do you know what you gave Andy? You gave him the ability to talk to me, and to all the people around him, and me to talk to him, as something other than a little child all the rest of his life. You didn't invade his mind -- if anything, he invaded yours. You didn't do anything except open wonderful, incredible new opportunities for him. You gave him a gift beyond price. How DARE you feel anything except happiness and pride for him, and for yourself? How could you possibly be anything except grateful for who you are, and what you can do? Why are you feeling sorry for yourself for being able to give miracles?"  
  
Reality was proving a slippery thing. "But -- you said -- "  
  
Randal threw up his hands in exasperation. "Where did you get such a talent for self-pitying rationalization? There isn't even a concept for such a thing in Kryptonian, and the Kents don't strike me as the type to go around feeling sorry for themselves. Maybe you ought to become a lawyer. The first thing lawyers learn is to tell people not to say 'it was my fault.'"  
  
"But it was my fault," he said miserably, forgetting the empath's sensitivity.  
  
"Maybe picking up that damn refined kryptonite in your bare hand, putting on that poisonous red ring, and opening the vault door in Lab 8 were your fault, though the jury is still out debating the plea of temporary insanity. I've always thought that it was stupid to have suicide on the books as a crime anyway. Probably the insurance lobby's doing. But you are not responsible for anything you did not consciously choose to do! Everything else, and I do mean EVERYTHING else, was somebody else's doing and somebody else's mistake."  
  
"The ship...."  
  
"Yeah, did it ever occur to you that maybe Jor-El was a lousy computer programmer? That maybe he's the one who bears the responsibility for invading YOUR mind? That it could have been either badly-worded advice or stupid nonsense orders based on knowing nothing more about Earth than what he got from watching old television? If my only source of news was the corporate-owned media right now, I'd tell Lake to blow up the damn planet myself."  
  
"My parents...."  
  
My parents, the empath noted with satisfaction. Clark, not Kal-El. "Oh, is your dad so well known around town for his sainthood and self-control and good driving record?"  
  
"They're good people," Clark muttered resentfully.  
  
"No doubt. Salt of the Earth and all that. But a bit on the selfish side, too. Not to mention paranoid. Maybe they had good intentions in making you hide so much of yourself. Maybe they understood that socializing with other children your age was necessary to proper emotional development. Home schooled kids turn out sociopathic more often than not. But I bet that's not the calm, logical reason they gave you for having to be such a sneak, was it?"  
  
Sneak. Yeah, that was the word. "They were afraid someone would take me away. They said the government would want to lock me up and study me. Experiment on me."  
  
"Considering some of the wigged-out bigots and McCarthyites in congress, maybe, but so what? Minus the meteorites, what could they possibly do to you? You could have gotten up and left whenever you got tired of the games, just like you can here." Randal waved a hand around them. "In case it's escaped your attention, while no one came to take you away, you did a pretty good job of that yourself. And we're all being studied here. Part of the job."  
  
"But if they had known about the meteorites...."  
  
"Would you finish a sentence for once? Was Jonathan planning on telling 'them'?"  
  
"No!" Clark remembered that terrible look on Jonathan's face while he was trying to comfort Martha, and suddenly wasn't so sure. Maybe.... No. Not even when Clark had gone so crazy with the red ring the first time. Dad and Pete had risked their own lives to get close to him -- they knew full well he could have snapped both their necks before Pete could get the lead box open -- rather than let anyone else know how to stop him. How to hurt him.  
  
"Not much of a sentence, but it's a start. For that matter, if you had been taken out of the area, probably no one would have known that the meteorites had any effect on you at all. Someone would have noticed an increased incidence in odd cancers, the rocks would have been examined more closely and hauled off to a toxic waste dump site somewhere, end of problem." Randal frowned. "It would have been less of a problem than having the Luthors know that there's something unusual about you, and about your weakness, anyway."  
  
Clark felt as if his blood had turned to ice. "They ... know ...?"  
  
"Is that a sentence? Of course they know, they didn't corral billions of dollars by being unobservant. The first thing they look for is signs of weakness. They probably have pictures of you nekkid, they certainly wouldn't miss your aversion to an all-too-common green stone. You became a target the day you pulled Lex out of the river. You think Luthors do anything out of gratitude? That truck was an attempt to buy you off. A lot cheaper and less publicly messy than a lawsuit. The fact that you didn't try to get money out of them for injuries or something was what tipped them off that you had something to hide. If Martha's father had known, he would have warned you about the way lawyers and rich people think."  
  
Clark shook his head, a defeated motion. "That was my fault too. Dad didn't want grand-dad around because he was afraid that he might find out about me. Because I was kind of careless when I was a kid."  
  
"Dammit!" Randal roared, surging to his feet. "I suppose it was your fault that Jonathan and old man Clark fought like rabid bulldogs from the day they met? You weren't even born when they both went to jail for being a public nuisance!" Randal calmed himself down with the practiced control of long experience, and sat back. "You need at least a year's worth of psychology reading. I'll ask Wynter to put that ahead of the legal studies, anyway."  
  
Clark groaned. Maybe it was time to get out of here after all.  
  
"You're going to need both, if you hope to play on anything like a level field with the Luthors some day. Corporate espionage is their middle name. They have spies in your high school, spies in the town, spies in Metropolis, spies in Washington. But we're better at it than they are, and we're having some, hm, Lake would call it fun, with them."  
  
Clark was pretty sure he didn't want to know what Lake's idea of fun was. Then he remembered what Lake's usual assignments were. "Why are you going to all this trouble?"  
  
Randal raised an eyebrow. "Because we can?"  
  
Clark scowled at him. "Randal, please, don't. I'm confused enough already. Playing twenty questions isn't helping me think, no matter what Socrates said."  
  
"Mm, Socrates. You have to remember that men who were considered brilliant and insightful for their time would be laughed out of junior high school today. The defining characteristic of a culture and its most brilliant members is the weight of experience that it has -- or chooses to accept."  
  
Clark fell back on the pillow with a moan. "Enough with the lessons already. Just, please, tell me why is a world-wide bunch of really scary agents so interested in just me?"  
  
Just you, Kal-El? The man across from him only wished there were words to tell him. "Because we don't believe in letting potential go to waste."  
  
"What potential?" Clark said tiredly. "To cause everyone more problems?"  
  
"STOP that. How about, the potential to do even more good things? Even greater things than the miracles you've already performed? You're still a child, and you've imposed so many limits on yourself. Imagine how much you could do if you set yourself free."  
  
"Imagine how dangerous." Clark flopped over on his stomach, the words muffled.  
  
Randal chuckled, low. "As opposed to Lake and Nicole? And a date with Dylana? Or Wynter with his highly illegal hack into every computer in the world? Or the number of nutcases loose in the world with the ability to set off an atomic bomb? Or the dictator-wanna-bes who control mobs through money and planted operatives? Trust me, I can imagine 'dangerous' better than you'll be able to for quite some time. But that's the point. The difference between what you CAN do, and what you WILL do, is a matter of individual choice. You have never, ever, chosen to deliberately hurt someone."  
  
"It happens anyway." Words still muffled. "I can't help it."  
  
"So? You think you can affect random chance the way Jacques does? Speaking of dangerous talents, our card sharp is also quite capable of turning any element past about neon into a nuclear bomb with a thought, just by changing the probabilities of neutron decay. But he doesn't go around doing it, and more than you go around setting fires and smashing walls. Tell me again how dangerous you are."  
  
"I hurt everyone who gets close to me." Muffled voice suspiciously broken.  
  
"You've saved the lives of everyone close to you, over and over. Try again."  
  
"They wouldn't have been in danger in the first place except for me!"  
  
"Oh, please. Would you like a look at Lex's arrest record? Lionel spent nearly as much covering up for him as the CIA did cleaning up after George Bush. You weren't even in school yet when he was first busted for cocaine and grand theft auto. Yep, that was your fault all right. Did you ever think that if he'd hit anyone but you on that bridge, it would have killed that person? Not that he would have cared about the manslaughter charge, because he'd be dead too. Right, the rich boy wouldn't be in danger except for you. Try again."  
  
"The meteorite mutants...."  
  
"Still having trouble finishing sentences, I see. Look at me." The voice was suddenly, unaccountably commanding. Clark found himself rolling over before he knew what he was doing, meeting Randal's sun-flecked eyes. "Did you deliberately bring those meteorites along with you? Would you have chosen to if you could have?"  
  
Clark shuddered. "No. No."  
  
"Two sentences. Very good. If you had known that they would cause mutations, would you personally have gone and cleaned them all up?"  
  
It was a dare. Clark sighed. "You know the answer to that."  
  
"Yes, I do. The question is, do you? How would you not do it alone? Would you have organized a trash bash, and just casually mentioned that the rocks were radioactive? Would you have contacted a university or government lab, and asked them to come investigate? Would you just get your parents to go collect them all and bury them?"  
  
Clark frowned. "I -- I suppose I should have. I didn't think of that."  
  
"And what do you suppose the response would have been when you were, what? Four or five? And why didn't your parents think of that themselves?"  
  
"They -- they didn't want to draw suspicions."  
  
"Draw suspicions to a meteor strike? Names of all the stars. That's dumber than the old 'secret' military space shuttle launches. As if you could hide a space shuttle launch by throwing a tarp over it and telling everyone the noise was an exploding Pinto. Rather like the way they tried to hide your spaceship, in fact. Even the Luthors only hired crackpots to collect meteorites, when NASA should have been all over them if they had any competent managers instead of a bunch of bean counters. I suppose government stupidity and inter-agency backbiting and theft is all your fault too. So tell me what else you're responsible for."  
  
"The baby," Clark whispered. "My parents lost their baby because of me."  
  
"I am getting tired enough of this to slap you again, and it hurts me a lot more than it does you. Yes, the Kents are one of those all-too-common obsessive-compulsive couples with the eighteenth-century idea that you're supposed to pop out babies to prove yourself. If you knew how many people pop out babies and then abandon them.... Or the kids who are born and then starve to death, or killed by nature's disasters, or shot in neighborhood crimes, or die of childhood cancers, or are hit by cars, or beaten to death by their parents...."  
  
Maybe if he moved fast enough, he could rip open all twenty vaults in Lab 8. "Stop," was all Clark could manage.  
  
"And then there's the people who know better than to try to have children," Randal went on brutally. "The people with better sense than me, for example, who know their genetics are screwed up. Or the people who have sense enough to understand that they'd be lousy parents, so they live their lives out alone and their family name and line dies with them. Maybe they take in foster kids, or have nieces or nephews, to balance against that instinctive evolutionary command to reproduce. Or once they get older and more mature, they decide to adopt." Randal's voice went nearly into the subsonic range. "Or maybe, once in a hundred million times, sheer blind luck drops the answer to their wishes and dreams right in front of them. Washed up on a beach or falling out of the sky or rescued from any of a million other things that can go wrong, sometimes one child becomes part of a family to make up for all the ones who were lost."  
  
Clark stared at him, heedless of his tear-blurred vision. "I'm not ... I'm not...."  
  
"Your parents HAVE the son they always wanted." Randal poked him in the chest. "Sure, they were a little shell-shocked. So were you. That doesn't excuse the way they treated you." His voice softened, became the comfortable warmth of a cat's purr. "You just ran, son. You were under a hell of a lot of stress, and you fought with people you thought you should have been able to trust, and you didn't know what else to do. That's such a common reaction that I'm half tempted to enroll you in a local runaways group with a hundred others just like you. Except that you'd probably try to teach them to curse in mathematics."  
  
"There aren't any others like me." Clark would have had to have more voice for his words to be called a whisper.  
  
"There aren't any other teenagers from Krypton who blew up their own spaceship to keep from having its computer yell at them in their head, no. That I know of, anyway. But there are a couple of hundred million teenagers who are going through a really shitty time on any given day. Teenagers pregnant who don't want to be. Teenagers losing their lives who don't want to die. Teenagers whose parents scream at them and throw them out of the house. Teenagers addicted to drugs, and teenagers losing their minds through no fault of their own. Do you really want to go down to, say, the barrios, and see how much sympathy you get?"  
  
Clark had only heard of the barrios as an offhand reference in sanitized news stories. And that kind of poverty was allowed to exist in the richest country in the world. He hadn't....  
  
Clark straightened. He hadn't even thought about the way too many places on this planet where teenagers blew up not just their homes, but themselves, and each other, on a daily basis. Even after what Mustafa had told him. Teenagers who didn't expect to live. Who didn't have any reason to live.  
  
He groaned. He'd seen some of the information input that John's news team watched every minute of every hour. Most of it was, by definition, unpleasant. How did they pick and choose what to involve themselves in? There was so much, so incomprehensibly much going wrong in the world. So much suffering. How did they keep their sanity, watching it all?  
  
"What happened to you was terrible, Kal-El. No one is going to make light of it. But I believe -- " Randal touched Clark's forehead, an unbelievably intimate gesture for an empath -- "that you are strong enough, and sane enough, whole enough, that it will not break you."  
  
"There's so much." Clark's voice was still too quiet to be said to have sound.  
  
"Yes, there is. And there always will be. So much for you personally, and so much for the world." Randal sat back. "You have to learn that there are some things you simply cannot do, and a great many things that happen despite your best intentions, and an awful lot of things that are simply beyond anybody's ability to change or help. Including yours."  
  
Clark's breath hitched. "How do you ... live with it?"  
  
"Honestly?" Randal's lips twitched on a smile. Clark marveled that the empath could even stand to be in the same room with him, much less manage to keep a sense of humor. "By taking the long view of things. The really, really, really long view. One day at a time."  
  
Clark managed a tiny quirk in response. "Isn't that a contradiction in terms?"  
  
"You haven't met John yet. Contradiction is his middle name." Randal tipped his head. "Which reminds me, John wants to see you tonight, if you feel up to it."  
  
"John ... wants ... to...?"  
  
"After supper, if you feel like it." Randal made a shrug gesture with one hand. "Take your time to get yourself together. If you don't want to, then you can say so at any time."  
  
Clark gulped. "Sounds like an offer I'm not supposed to refuse."  
  
Randal snorted. "This is not the real world, Kal. This is the Baron's domain, and what he says goes. And one of the things he says is that no one coerces anybody, not even him. Though you probably don't want to know about some of his and Lake's discussions."  
  
Not the real world. Well, that said it all, didn't it? "What if I just, you know, don't?"  
  
"If you decide to leave?" Randal stared him in the eyes. Clark had never seen eyes so unreadable. "Well, that's your decision too. I'll tell you right here and now that it would be a mistake, but since when have you ever listened to advice? We'd miss you. And you'd be throwing away a lot of opportunities. And you'd always be welcome back, whenever you chose. No one would try to stop you. Though the next time Nikki sees you, she'll probably punch you until she gets tired of hitting you. But why do you want to run, Kal? Clark?"  
  
Clark looked away. "Maybe I just need some time to digest it all." And maybe I want to be part of the real world instead of John's.... I don't know.  
  
"That, I can well believe. Is there any reason you can't do that here for awhile?" Randal stood up. "In the meantime, do you know what the definition of a hero is, kid?"  
  
Somebody he didn't want to be. "Somebody who saves people."  
  
"Not even close. A hero is someone who risks something of themselves, for the good of others, without thought of gain for themselves. Look it up before Wynter puts it on your assignment list. Your friend Whitney is a hero. The volunteers who deliver meals to shut-ins in dangerous neighborhoods are heroes. And I hate to break it to you, but so are you."  
  
"No." Clark just didn't want to go there. Rule them with strength. Go away.  
  
Randal squatted in front of him, bouncing a little. "You put others before yourself," he said gently. "You gave up a lot to try to make it better for others. You left everything you had rather than risk hurting your family and friends. You only made one mistake, hero. You tried to do it alone. Ask Whitney someday. A team is greater than the sum of its parts."  
  
Startlement jolted Clark out of his confusion and denial. "Whitney's dead."  
  
Randal stood again and gave him a sideways smile than only a very powerful psi could pull off. "Don't be so sure. There are such things as misidentified records." He started for the door, then hesitated and looked back. "You're welcome to stay here, of course, if you don't feel like going back to your own room. Either way, take your time to think everything through." Randal tapped his head. "Call for something to eat if you want, or wander around. But mostly, we'd really appreciate it if you didn't run off until you've talked to John."  
  
Clark swallowed his misgivings and did his best to replace them with mild curiosity and belief, the way he had done for Nicole. He nodded halfheartedly. "I promise."  
  
Randal's smile was sad, but believing. Well, of course. Randal had probably known every thought that went through his head. How he'd survived it was another question entirely.  
  
"Randal...?" Clark decided to dare himself the question, however tentatively.  
  
Randal cocked his head. Clark took a careful breath. "How do you do it? Keep from, well, going crazy, with all the suffering and crap you share with the rest of us?"  
  
Randal actually gave a low chuckle. "Emotions are what bind us all together, my young friend. The happy pleasure of a dog at play, or a cat being petted, is more powerful than all the angst of uncertainty, and more lasting than any despair of loss. You learn from it, and you build from it, because the weight of experience only makes you stronger."  
  
"That which does not kill me," Clark quoted ironically.  
  
"Don't go comparing time and change to Lab 8." Randal cuffed him lightly. "Even Lake can tell you that there's some things that you don't grow calluses over. Radiation poisoning being one of them. And I would really appreciate it if you didn't do that again. Being with Dylana when she tried to empty the sky of lightning was far preferable."  
  
Which was killing her, but also exalting her. Clark nodded slowly. "I don't really plan to."  
  
"Glad to hear it. And the rest of it?" The empath's eyes were penetrating.  
  
Clark let out a slow breath. "Go on. I promise to wait and talk to John."  
  
Randal stared at him a moment longer, then nodded and left. Clark lay back on the bed and wondered if Kal-El was capable of such emotions, or if he wanted him to be.  
  
John's quarters were shielded with everything any of them could think of, but there were always faster rats. The Martian Manhunter, wearing Randal's simulacrum, entered the outer door and shut it -- an unusual occurrence -- before allowing his appearance to shift.  
  
Randal was already waiting for him. "Brutal, huh?" the actual Randal said softly.  
  
"Very." J'onn wiped his green forehead. "I apologize for the violation of your identity. The use of your memories was instrumental in gaining Kal-El's acceptance."  
  
"You're welcome, and it's I who owes you thanks." Randal shook his head. "I couldn't have handled that one on one. The hysterics were about my limit. God he's strong."  
  
"And the damage runs deep," J'onn agreed. "That alien strength may be the only thing holding him together."  
  
"You ETs always give yourself all the credit." Randal's smile was feeble.  
  
"Randal has a point, J'onn." The Baron came out from his back room, rubbing an ear where the communicator had irritated it. "The alien physical resilience is what's working against him. The human emotional strength he's been raised with is what we're counting on to keep him from actual schizophrenia. How far did you manage to get into his mind?"  
  
No one except John could have asked that question without earning the Manhunter's severe disapproval at the invasion of privacy. "Far enough to counter some of his complexes, I think, though he'll have to work through them one by one to believe it himself. His instinct to help and protect others comes honestly from both his families, though Jor-El was rather unique among Kryptonians that way. He will always be afraid of himself. It might be just as well to allow him to keep that. There is very little else to keep him from losing control."  
  
John regarded him. "Are you ever afraid of yourself, Martian?"  
  
J'onn smiled, and shifted his appearance to mimic John's again. "Always, Baron. Even after a century of training as a lawgiver. Are you never afraid of yourself?"  
  
"Of myself? Not for a long time." John's eyes unfocused, but the empath and telepath had no trouble reading the weight that brooded there. "Of mistakes? Forevermore." 


	12. And, Finally, Baron John

Last Chapter (okay, I heard that sigh of relief!) -- Baron John.  
  
Evening at the Special Operations compound was marked by the smell of cooking food, tired chuckles over low conversations, dark curses at uncooperative equipment, locks being locked and snuck open again, and excited whispers concerning night operations plans. For Clark, tonight, it was also marked by the prospect of a plain half-opened door in the bottom of the complex.  
  
"Come in, son." The voice was neither deep not light, as nondescript as Lake's casual glance. (Lake could kill with her mind alone. Her glance was deadlier than his heat vision.) Having known Lex and Lionel, that concealment of power spoke volumes to Clark: training and experience to a frightening degree. John didn't even care to try to impress anyone.   
  
Lionel wasn't even in Lake's ballpark. Lake's glacier eyes betrayed her ability to literally freeze a living being at a thought. And Lake answered to John.  
  
Clark steeled himself. He could throw a tractor over his shoulder. Bombs pissed him off only because they burned his clothes. Machine guns amused him as he matched the bullets' speed, and Dylana had established that no, a nuclear bomb wouldn't much hurt him.  
  
Lake terrified him. And he was about to meet her boss.  
  
Clark took a deep breath and walked through the door. "Randal said you wanted to see me, sir."  
  
John's dark gray eyes looked up and took in his face with a trace of amusement. "I always make time for anyone who has gone to the effort to visit us, but sometimes it's delayed by circumstances beyond my control. I appreciate your coming here, Clark, Kal-El. I just wanted to check on how things were going with you."  
  
Check on him? The whole place was wired for stereo, Clark thought, there was probably a bug planted in his underwear. But he was too busy dissecting the double and triple layers of meaning in the Baron's greeting to find time for resentment at that. No one "went to the effort to visit" Special Operations without a very specific invitation, and circumstances beyond John's control probably meant nothing less than a full-scale disaster.  
  
"Fine. Sir." Clark bit down on his tongue, trying to get himself under control. This was worse than going to the principal's office in first grade. "Um, I'm learning a lot." If the past few days had been lessons, then this was some sort of serious test.  
  
John nodded. "Good to hear. It's been a long time since a Renaissance Man could learn everything there was to know about their world, but we disgrace our heritage if we ignore it and don't try to learn at least some of it."  
  
Clark felt himself retreating into the distance again. Earth's heritage wasn't his.  
  
If John noticed Kal-El surfacing in Clark again, he didn't let on. Covering up for himself, Kal-El thought, with a trace of anger and racial contempt, if not outright hostility.   
  
"You know the quote," John went on mildly, clearly ignoring Kal-El's look even as he met his eyes. "'If I have seen further than others, it is only because I have stood on the shoulders of giants.' Look it up, and the history it entails. It's a complex relationship, but you might find it inspiring. Of course," he added, as if in afterthought, "Krypton's history was pretty complex too. Eight world wars? I'm not sure if that's something to be proud of, but it's unlikely that this planet's mammalian population would have survived such a record."  
  
Clark and Kal-El both felt the room reel around him, as if John had taken out a meteor rock. "How did you...?"  
  
"Sit down, son." John gestured. "I accessed your spaceship's messaging system as soon as we found out about it, of course." There was actually a literal twinkle in his eyes. "I have read my own science fiction collection, you know. Along with the rest of the library."  
  
The SO library's science fiction collection alone was over a hundred thousand books, counting the ones that veered on fantasy or horror. The hardcopy library took up three entire buildings, larger than the main library in Metropolis, and that didn't count the computers. Clark sat down heavily. Either John was an even faster reader than he was, or....   
  
"How old are you?" The man looked in his late forties, a touch of gray hair, lines in his face from smiling and frowning and sun, but no sags or wrinkles. Clark realized that he should have guessed immediately that it was impossible for someone so young to have put together an organization like Special Operations, much less ride herd on all its recruits.  
  
John nodded in approval. "Wynter and Dylana must be pushing you. Most people don't make that connection for months, if not years. Not even Cyrus and Randal did until they touched me and knew what to try to read for. I would tell you, Clark, because anything in this organization that would cause mistrust among any of us is too dangerous to risk any of our people for, with our talents, but I honestly don't know. I came to America not long after the Revolutionary War, but long stretches before that simply run together." The Baron smiled again. "You wait, it will happen to you too in a few years. By the time you're thirty, you won't even remember Lana's coming-out birthday party."  
  
The one where her moron aunt had given her that damn meteorite necklace -- what kind of psycho thought a kid should have a souvenir of her parents' death? -- and she'd twirled around and held it right up to his face to show him how pretty it was, when they came in from the cookout to open her presents. He'd collapsed and thrown up from the violent nerve shock and passed out in front of everybody. He'd later learned that Lana had sat beside him, crying in concern (and because her birthday party was ruined, for which she'd never quite forgiven him), until Jonathan had come to get him. With her necklace still in her hand, of course.  
  
Sheer luck that their farm was next door and someone had thought to call his parents and his dad had gotten there before the ambulance. He'd been frighteningly sick for hours from the prolonged radiation exposure, and the butt of jokes for a month. Clark didn't even bother to ask how John knew about that. "Not likely," he growled.  
  
"Time conquers all," John said gently. "Entropy, actually. In fact, I'm a little pleased that you don't seem to be particularly gifted at science. That was one part of your family tree that might have been too easily inherited, and it was too often misused. If your destiny is to rule the world, Kal-El, at least it won't be the way half your own ancestors tried to do it."  
  
Clark felt dizzy again. "What did you do, plug into the damn thing? The only other, well, human, who did that went insane -- " oh, man, maybe he shouldn't have said that, but it was too late now -- "And catatonic, and got mutated, and ended up being killed." And it was my fault, Clark added to himself, reflexively.  
  
"The linguist killed himself with his carelessness, and he was a nutcase to begin with and an idiot anyway," John said, unconcernedly dismissive. "Lake wanted to get rid of him as soon as he started obsessing over the language symbology; she was pretty sure he couldn't handle the direct feed. Lake was right, as usual. She has good instincts about power. I would have sent her before he took care of the problem himself, but she was on assignment elsewhere.   
  
"Personally, I found the information processor fascinating, though I'll admit that it gave me a headache. Wynter and Virgil Swann are still arguing over interpretations. Virgil was rather more shocked to find out about Wynter's age than he was by the download. In fact, the good doctor has managed to make use of some of the readings to restore most of his own damaged nervous system, with Bill's help. You really should go see him again. Knowing that you existed was just about the only thing that kept him alive, after the accident."  
  
"That I existed?" Clark said faintly. "That can't be.... I thought he.... He wants to.... He's not afraid of...?"  
  
"Afraid of you?" John sat up very straight and stared at him. "Of meeting intelligent life from another planet? Someone that we here on Earth can actually communicate with, and who would be willing and able to listen to what Earth-humans have to say and offer? Clark, Kal-El, what kind of fools have you been getting your opinions from? If you've been brainwashed by any of those moronic squawk shows, I will turn Lake loose on them."  
  
"No! No, I just meant...." What on Earth (yes, Earth) DID he mean? They knew about Krypton, about the orders to obey and rule, and they weren't terrified? They knew what he could do, what he HAD done, and John was carelessly talking about sending LAKE against the fearful people to PROTECT him? Even kryptonite didn't make it this hard to swallow.  
  
"You mean, Wynter, and Doctor Swann know about the message too?"  
  
"And Dylana, and Little Sky, and Randal, and Myriam, and all the other mental talents and power-handlers with the capability and discipline to accept the feed, right on down to young Kurt -- that's right, you haven't met our sun-channeler yet, which is probably just as well, since he still tends to melt things when he gets excited, and he's very excited about meeting you.   
  
"In fact, about the only person we haven't given access to the download is Lake. I would rather not risk the possibility of her discovering that her mind can create a wormhole singularity, such as your ship used, on the surface of a planet. She understands, but she's still tempted. We're both rather relieved that you destroyed it."  
  
"I had to." John made it sound so, so reasonable. So ordinary. Clark's own voice came back to him from a long way away. "But I hurt... so many people...."  
  
John raised an eyebrow. "I don't suppose you've read the records on Lake."  
  
Clark gave that just enough thought to shy away from it. "She'd kill me."  
  
"Oh, she'd do much worse than that. She'd talk to you about it. Calmly, politely, and frankly. And Kal-El, perhaps you'd better read them -- they're fairly highly classified even among our own people, but very little here is outside of your need-to-know -- because if she ever does talk with you, you will definitely need to know what you're in for."  
  
John leaned back casually in his chair, and to Clark, the human gesture was as unbelievable on him as it would have been on the mask he'd seen Lex wear. "I found Lake by following a trail of unexplained and rather gruesome murders. People had been taken apart -- literally, their bodies turned into something you don't want to even imagine right now -- with no other marks on them. No sign of weapons, or any other sort of physical contact. Even to me, the idea that someone might be capable of doing that without touching them seemed, well, difficult to comprehend. But we have old movies of her. Those, you don't need to see for another few years. Punks would try to snatch her on the street. And then they would be," John made a disturbing gesture with one hand, like a slow claw slash, "dismembered. She was, oh, about the same age as you were when you landed here. Two or three."  
  
Clark held nausea in check only through dint of long hard practice. The first picture that came to him was of the small slim pale woman with the startling flash of a smile who had been teaching him to fly. Involuntarily, his mind substituted a tiny homeless child on the streets. Being subjected to torture, rape, hunger, cold, pain. With the power to strike back -- power even more dangerous than his, especially at that age -- and no reason not to, no conscience or parents or anyone to care who could teach her that there was love in the world.  
  
No wonder Lake was psychopathic. What choice had she had?  
  
"You did what you felt you had to do. No one else is entitled to stand on judgment for your actions with your own property. It was your choice alone, whatever the cost."   
  
John turned away and steepled his fingers, a gesture that Clark was pretty sure was as contrived as his appearance. But his voice held no trace of artifice. "During the Civil War, the War Between the States," he said softly -- and Clark was suddenly enlightened as to where that ability among John's people had come from, to so easily call everyone by two different and sometimes opposing names, -- "I was a field medic. I wore clothing as neutral as I could come by, and served both sides whenever I could. I saw brothers shooting their own brothers, fathers killing sons and sons killing fathers, anger and insanity and waste over causes that neither could prevail on through such a useless war. I saw hatred and arrogance, overriding what should have been at least knowledge of what could have been done, and sanity enough to top and talk and think. I saw people suffering loss and pain and conflict with themselves that even you can barely imagine.   
  
"I saw a woman trying to give birth on a battleground, even as she was holding the hands of the dying men to try to comfort them. The woman died in my arms, under my care. Her baby made it four more days before he died of starvation and diarrhea. I couldn't feed him, and the drugs were gone."  
  
The memory of the look in his father's eyes -- Jonathan's, not Jor-El's -- that had hurt so badly that he'd risked the red kryptonite, faded to insignificance. Clark wanted to faint, to retreat to unconsciousness to keep from hearing any more. It was only Kal-El that refused to allow him to pass out in front of John.  
  
"Hundreds of years ago, you say. You think it doesn't happen today? I stayed out of actual combat zones during Korea and Viet Nam, in order to funnel relief efforts where I could, but I doubt if any of the survivors would thank me much. Sometimes I think demons truly do rise up and infest all of us, until we are forced to confront them. I am good at war, as you might imagine, but I have no taste for it. If more people had to experience war up close and personal, fewer of them would be willing to drop bombs."  
  
He turned and faced Clark again, still distant in the storm-cloud eyes, but focused on him. "In your ship's indoctrination tapes, I saw the man who provided the male half of your heritage -- the download wasn't clear on whether or not you were artificially enhanced, although there were indications that you had been genetically engineered to a certain extent just in order to survive being sent away -- begging, pleading, with the ruling council, to look at the evidence, to face the growing problems, instead of playing dominance games and being addicted to their own blind convictions of superiority. Sound familiar? It ought to, if you watch the world-wide news. The female half of your genetic heritage was standing in opposition to him. Civil war, over a baby, with the survival of the planet and the entire species at stake. In the end, the only thing they agreed on was to oppose the rest of the entire unwilling population, and do whatever they could to keep their only child, the whole world's only and last child, alive."  
  
John turned his chair away again. "The north and the south both lost. The east and the west both lost. All of the factions of the ruling council of Krypton lost. Jor-El and Lara both lost. You may be the only winner in the history of all civil wars."  
  
Clark / Kal-El was absolutely certain that the room had been lined with green rocks. His eyes hurt. His throat hurt. He couldn't breathe. "I didn't ... I didn't see...."  
  
"I'm not surprised you can't consciously dredge up the full download. There was a few million libraries' worth of information there, maybe excluding Alexandria. What I wouldn't give for time travel, to rescue some of that! Never mind. Have the psych team teach you self-hypnosis. It takes time and concentration, but with your self-control, you should be as good as Lex at it within a week. Just don't fall asleep while you're digging into your family history. The dreams can be brutal.  
  
"Which reminds me. Alexander Luthor was discharged from the hospital yesterday, at his own ranting insistence, and is back at that rather unsubtle mansion in Smallville."  
  
Kal-El's gut finally twisted on a sob, when the final straw of emotional strain broke the alien command. Tears ran down his face. Clark wondered how his head could be so clear. It felt like all the samples from Lab 8 were hanging around his neck. "Thanks," he murmured.  
  
"You owe me no thanks," John said, so seriously and sternly that it reset Clark's mood like a slap. "If anything, I owe you an apology. I didn't find out what it was to be different until well into adulthood, aside from the minor convenience of recovering easily from injuries and illnesses that would have killed most of the people of that time. I did not learn until much later how hard it would be on others, to have no others like themselves. No gods will ever know how many children I failed to find or help, and how many like Lake I may have created in my arrogance, believing I could control them once I had unleashed them. I failed you a long time ago, Kal-El. There is nothing I can do to make up for that, and everything I can offer now is not enough for what you have been through."  
  
"It wasn't your fault!"  
  
"Tell that to William. Tell that to yourself."  
  
Clark took a deep breath and met his eyes, those storm-colored ancient eyes that he for some reason could not see through, though the rest of the Baron's body was pretty much normal-human to x-rays, aside from a disconcerting impression of perfection. "Okay. I will."  
  
John smiled, and it was like being basked in sudden sunlight. "Is that a promise?"  
  
Clark steeled himself to face a future of trying not to blame himself. "Yes."  
  
"I am holding you to that. If you break your promise, I will tell Lake." He turned to the desk behind him, and picked up a remote phone. "I don't believe the people who sent you here meant for you to become a dictator, Clark. The language is ambiguous because of the cultural context, which is something you'll have to get used to on this planet too. There are many ways to rule, and force is the least effective in the long run." He gestured around. "As you have seen here, I hope.  
  
"Krypton's one-world society was a rigid one, but not a cruel one. My feeling is that you were meant to "lead with strength" by setting an example for this all-too-confused world, because you are a strong and worthy example to be followed. Because of who you are, not just what you are -- a very good person, a kind and thoughtful and caring person, even at your age. A young man who went alone, and nearly on your own, through some of the toughest trials anyone could ever be put through. Short of actual combat. And we don't usually send little children into combat unless there is nothing left to lose. We need to broaden your history reading. You tended to score better on the worst examples our planet has set, and not so well on the heroes."  
  
Clark scowled a little, but it was the truth. He identified more with the morbid than with the happy times. "All gods have feet of clay, and come to a bad end," he muttered.  
  
John actually chuckled. "You're thinking of wars again. I'm not talking about gods, Clark. You know full well our prohibition against playing god, Lake and Dylana's occasional rampages notwithstanding. I'm talking about heroes, the day-to-day hero that can be there in all of us. The hero that needs only a little encouragement, an example, to come out in everyone.  
  
"I suggest you read up on, oh, for example, the early days of the space program, to see what mortal hands and minds will actually dare to try. What the most talented among us can aspire to, what even the most vulnerable will rush into, no matter what the cost we risk for failure. Have you never run across the phrase, 'our reach must exceed our grasp'?" Clark would have sworn on a stack of glowing rocks of all colors that a wistful expression for the good old days -- wistful! John! letting him see! -- crossed his face. "Oh, of course there was the lighter stuff, too. Engineers and technicians would have fistfights on the floor of the VAB over pressurization tolerances. But it was a chance to do everything we could do, give our all, in a great and worthy cause. One of the few places I can be proud to say, I was there."   
  
John looked down at the phone he'd been toying with. "What is a quest, Clark? What is your destiny, Kal-El? You are both, and together, searching for something. You didn't have to be ordered to do that. It's part of living and growing older -- growing up -- for everyone." The centuries-old man made a conspiratorial sound of amusement. "Even I learn something new every day, if I'm not very careful to keep my eyes and ears and mind closed.   
  
"Can't the time you spend searching, and learning, be considered your quest? This is a huge and enormously complex world all on its own, Clark Kal-El Kent. Most people never see a fraction of it. Even I can barely claim to have scratched the surface."  
  
*Our* quest. Clark looked down, blinking. I can be both. I *am* both. And I can be accepted as both. No, as what he said. As one and the same. I can be from Krypton, and still call Earth my home. "There is an awful lot," he whispered.  
  
"As you and I and a few others are uniquely in a position to know. And we also know that there are no easy ways out. Is reaching your full potential what all your parents wanted for you? Is opening up and accepting all that you are, doing everything you can do and be, facing up to all that there is both out there and inside, enough to satisfy the hopes for the last survivor of a destroyed world and the lawyer's daughter who married a stubborn farmer?"  
  
Clark wished that to be a rhetorical question, but John sat waiting for an answer, with the patience of someone who had had centuries to learn to wait. "It will have to be, won't it?" he said heavily. Looking for an answer. Looking for something to hold onto.  
  
"No," John said gently. "Nothing has to be unless we let it be. Wars don't have to be. Hatred and fear do not have to be. I don't even have to leave this room. Neither does anyone else. But we choose to, just as we make the decision sometime to do both the very wrong and the very good. Because we can."  
  
Not much to hold onto. But Clark straightened his shoulders. It was a massive weight, the weight of this world. Two worlds. He wondered how others had borne it, without his physical strength. Yet somehow, they had. "Okay. I can try. To choose it to be."  
  
John regarded him for a long half-minute from those storm-colored eyes, seemingly impassive. Inside, despite his years, he was anything but. Make or break, with all of Earth in the balance. John had no illusions about the future, having so much of the past to draw from. Earth was entering an age where half its crazy population could destroy everything, not to mention what might still be lurking out there among the billions of stars. Clark could be the whole planet's best hope of salvation. Or the mind-damaged teenager could become its most dangerous threat.  
  
The others had done all they could. The Baron was the last chance that the world had left.  
  
"As someone who has seen a lot of people giving their all," John said in a carefully normal, friendly, quiet tone, "My opinion is that you'll succeed." His eyes glittered as if lightning had flickered through the clouds. "You would have loved meeting Marie Curie. Remind me to tell you about her some time."  
  
He glanced at something on his desk screen, and that sunlight smile that Lake must have learned from, when she allowed herself to actually feel happiness, lit his face again. "In the meantime, the circumstances beyond my control that I mentioned was the time it took to convince your parents and friends to meet at Lex's place so they could make use of his better-secured privacy circuit. I prefer not to give out my personal number to every operator in Kansas." He held out the phone to Clark just as it rang. "I believe this call is for you."  
  
Clark damn near bolted for the door. He made it five steps at full speed before the situation -- the timing, the conversation, the whole setup, registered on him.  
  
No circumstances were ever beyond John's control, not even Clark's. The Baron's choices might be incomprehensible to those without his unimaginable experience, but if John chose to play god, no one, not even Lake or Nicole or Dylana or Kal-El, were ever out of his reach.  
  
He stopped, and braced himself, and turned back to meet John's level, challenging, sympathetic, expectant gaze. It was harder to face than opening the vault in Lab 8.   
  
But he took the phone. 


End file.
